CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH

AND THE SUBJECT OF LANDSCAPE

Joseph Leo Koerner

 
  
  


and the subject of landscape
CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH
    

Joseph Leo Koerner

 

 
 Published by
  
 Great Sutton Street,
London  , 

First published 

First edition transferred to digital printing 
This second, revised edition published 

Copyright © ,  Joseph Leo Koerner

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in Singapore

by Craft Print International Ltd

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Koerner, Joseph Leo, –
Caspar David Friedrich and the subject of landscape.
. German paintings. Friedrich, Caspar David
1. Title
.
     
 

 
Romanticizing the World 
1 From the Dresden Heath 
2 The Subject of Landscape 
3 Romanticism 

 
Art as Religion 
4 The Non-Contemporaneity of the Contemporary 
5 Sentimentalism 
6 Friedrich’s System 
7 Symbol and Allegory 
8 The End of Iconography 

 
The Halted Traveller 
9 Entering the Wood 
10 Theomimesis 
11 Reflection 
12 Déjà vu 
Afterword 
   
   
 
  
Romanticizing the World

‘Die Welt muss romantisiert werden. So findet man

den ursprünglichen Sinn wieder.’

The world must become romanticized. That way one finds

again the original meaning.
Novalis
 Trees and Bushes in the Snow, . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.
 I
From the Dresden Heath

You are placed before a thicket in winter (illus. ). The thicket, a cluster
of bare alders, rises from the snow to fill your gaze: a mesh of grey-brown
lines traced sometimes with white. The alders’ forked twigs and branches,
tapering to sharp points, compose loose patterns against the dull sky.
Here and there appear regular networks, the products of branches evenly
spaced, overlapped and viewed from one spot before the thicket. Just
above the ground, where the thicket is densest, you see branches dissolv-
ing into an abstract play of criss-crossed lines. Only rarely, however, has
the artist simply x-ed his canvas with thin brown lines, heedless of the logic
of each individual plant. In the variously pointing twigs near the canvas’s
edge, in the curved and unpredictable growth of larger, moss-covered
stems which pass over and within the network, the artist recuperates –
becomes a scholar of – the singularity of this thicket. The random signature
of each specific twig as it forks out at its own angle, and in its own shape
and thickness (despite whatever law commands its ordered growth), under-
writes the particularity of the whole. It testifies that the network was and
is this way, and no other way, and that you, therefore, are placed here,
rather than elsewhere, before this thicket in winter.
Somehow the painting places you. Somehow it singles you out to stand
before a thicket, just as it singles out each individual branch of that thicket
and displays its particularity against the dull sky, as if the singular itself
were contingent upon the placement of your eye. Once installed, you seek
confirmation of your arrival, some motivative sign or plot that will explain
why you are here. The thicket, though, is unremarkable. Neither is it
itself a superior specimen of a thicket, nor does it shape a space before
itself which could be a setting for other, more remarkable, presences. The
alders stand lifeless, their dull brown branches composed in random, broken
configurations. The snow that highlights and surrounds the thicket is itself
sullied variously by withered crab grass, clods of grey soil and dry leaves
trapped since autumn among the alder stems. You do not stand before a
‘landscape’, since the thicket blocks any wider prospect of its setting; nor do


   

the snow and alders, pushed up against the picture plane, quite constitute
the monumentality of a ‘scene’, for they provide no habitat for an event.
What alone welcomes you, what corresponds to your attention, is the
thicket’s very placement in a picture. The visual field centres itself around
the alders, framing them off as systematically as any random mesh of
branches can be framed. The few twigs that pass out of the picture (at the
left and beside the patch of blue sky) seem controlled by fine-tuned coin-
cidences of picture edge and outer twig elsewhere. And, above and below,
the open sky and snow-covered earth preserve a certain margin around
the thicket. That is, although you are placed before nothing that should
command your attention, this void, pictured, seems already to imply your
gaze. The framed and centred thicket appears to you, if nothing else, as
something viewed. You might believe that it is yours whose sight you see
of a thicket in the snow. You might even suppose, in a space as lifeless and
alone as this, that all the order is the order of your gaze, the patterns of
the branches ones that you have arranged.
This painting, however, will not be familiarized. Towards you the
thicket borders on the solid, mundane ground of clods, dead grass and
snow. Further into space, however, in the thick of the alders, the ground
drops off indeterminately. You could presume that the foreground snow
simply gives way to a gentle sloping of the land, or that the thicket is root-
ed in a sunken patch of earth. Yet your placement forbids certainty on this
matter of ground. At their bases, the alders stand silhouetted against a
narrow, horizontal stripe of purplish grey, delimited below by the snowy
foreground’s curved edge, and above by a band of lighter grey. This stripe
may invoke the thicket’s spatial extent, yet it neither measures, nor limits
itself to, that space. Indeed its blurred boundaries, neutral colour and nebu-
lous shape render space radically indefinite, causing the alders to appear
as presences conjured up from a bottomless deep. The thicket’s placement
at the very centre of the canvas, moreover, its seeming coincidence with
the order of your gaze, only intensifies the caesura between the mundane
and particularized foreground in which you exist and an entirely indeter-
minate and potentially infinite background. For by insisting that the edges
of the canvas appear as the limits of the thicket, the painting confounds
any ordered progression of vision into depth, any contextualization of the
thicket within a stable and continuous ‘terrain’. The thicket thus rises up
before you abruptly, as pure foreground, like a net woven over an abyss.
You survey the painting for the trace of a horizon. You search for
something more than just a shallow foreground spread out immediately


    

against the sky. Less than a third of the way up the canvas, you are given
a sign: a subtle shift in areas of grey, in painted planes of grey, that meet
along a blurred horizontal line about where the horizon might be. Below, the
lighter plane is a band mirroring the foreground strip of snow in size and
shape. It can read either as a hazy winter landscape stretching indefinitely
into the distance, or as merely a division within blankets of fog or clouds.
This line, hardly a line, is too insubstantial to confirm for you the meeting
of earth and sky, yet you balance your vision against this even change of hue
from pale to darker grey. Call this the world in which the thicket stands.
You bear down further on the painting. You examine its surface, where
those planes of grey meet along a horizontal. No change of substance is
registered here, only the universal blank of pigments evenly applied. You
bear down, too, upon the thicket, upon that overpainted network of lines
that control the scene’s particularity. This is a thicket fashioned of thinnest
paint, a mere glaze of greyish brown laid down translucent, like the fog
that is its ground, over grey. Here you discover the thicket’s only stable
scale (for who is to say whether the alders are trees or shrubs?): a thing no
larger than the painted likeness it is, a miniature on a canvas  x  cm in
size. An unremarkable object decorating the unremarkable. You have sur-
veyed the thicket and found it groundless – alders on a void, themselves a
void. You turn at last to interpret what you see.
The scene of a thicket in the snow may stand devoid of life, emptied
of all human reference, all continuities of scale and space which would
connect the viewer to the landscape. Yet in the intensity with which it fixes
on its motif, and in the way it arrests the viewer by its very focus on the
unremarkable, the canvas fashions about itself a humanizing plot. This
story might read: someone, perhaps a traveller through the countryside,
has paused to behold a certain group of alders. What has captured his gaze
remains uncertain. Perhaps he admires the sublime contrast of slender
branches set against an inscrutable ground of snow, fog and clouds; per-
haps he believes that the alders, in their lifeless, inhospitable form, harbour
some secret message for him about himself or about the world, ‘thoughts
that do often lie too deep for tears’. The canvas simply depicts what the
traveller saw. To the viewer, meaning is merely indicated, never confirmed.
Each clod of earth in the foreground, for example, is punctuated by a dark
spot, like the entrance to a burrow. Against the wanderer’s exile and
estrangement might thus be set a condition of refuge and dwelling. The
four clods, moreover, correspond in number and position to the main alder
stems that grow above, suggesting a graveyard allegory of death and life.


   

The tiny patch of pale blue sky at the upper right, which eases the dull
monochromy of the winter scene, embellishes this reading: against the
death-in-life of earthly existence, the canvas offers a vision of transcen-
dence, hence the formal caesura between the detailed and mundane fore-
ground (the finite) and the boundless, horizonless distance (the infinite).
The particular content of such plots or allegories are less important than
their felt presence within your experience of the canvas. If nothing else,
they shape the thicket into a meaningful object, excavating it from a larger
passage through inanimate nature (the traveller’s journey, say) and inhab-
iting it with an uncertain, but totalizing subjectivity, as the picture of an
experience of a thicket.
You are placed before a thicket. You seek entrance to that which
commands your attention. The scene becomes an extension of yourself,
a buried meaning, an experience half-remembered, or what you will. You
believe that, because this is a painted scene, it is somehow for you, and that
insignificant nature, represented, will have a bearing on your life. Frozen
in your passage before the canvas, however, like a moth drawn towards a
flame, you discover your kinship with the canvas: object among objects.
You are placed before a grove of fir trees in the snow (illus. ). The
trees and pale blue sky create an architecture ordered around your gaze
and coincident with the canvas’s geometry. The tallest fir, stationed at the
middle of the painting, establishes the central axis of a rigorous symme-
try that commands the whole. This symmetry is tempered throughout by
a natural randomness of detail. Thus, for example, the two large trees that
flank the central fir, as well as the pair of saplings planted in the fore-
ground, are not matched exactly in size, shape or placement within the
visual field. And the diagonal rising right to left, carried by the snowy
upper branches of smaller trees before the central fir, finds nowhere a cor-
responding diagonal rising left to right. Such apparent inconsistencies,
however, are always gauged against that prevailing rage for order that
points the centre tree’s snow-capped tip at the precise midpoint of the
picture’s upper framing edge, and that divides the canvas horizontally into
perfect halves where the sky reaches down between the right and central
firs. The grove’s episodes of asymmetry and randomness, its excursions
into the accidental and particular, function merely to place the picture’s
order within the natural world. They assure you that the geometry you
see does not belong to the canvas alone, but is coextensive with the grove
itself, which seems somehow to have grown precisely to accommodate
and frame your gaze. The uncanny coincidence between natural object and


 Fir Trees in the Snow, . Ernst von Siemens-Kunstfonds,
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Munich.


   

pictorial order emerges partly from the shape of the represented objects.
Fir trees generally take the form of upright isosceles triangles, and their
boughs, twigs and needles establish diagonals which rise upward from
their stem, contrapuntal to the trees’ shoulders. The bilateral symmetry
of the fir grove before you, and its construction out of diagonals, out of
fir trees rising from the ground and triangular slices of blue sky descend-
ing from above, becomes generalized, ubiquitous. Within this grove of
firs, anywhere you look you will be placed before the same basic order, the
same reciprocity between your gaze and its object, your body (itself sym-
metrical and tapering towards the top) and the world.
The picture does not so much place you as embrace you. It fashions
before you a small space flanked by saplings and celebrated by symmetry:
a clearing sized to a body such as yours. The grove becomes a frame for
your gaze, a natural altarpiece with you as its single, consecrated object.
Its inclusive form, which asserts that order resides in the things them-
selves rather than in the specific constellation of the visible viewed from
one point in space, assures you that such altars, once recognized, are
everywhere discoverable.
This scene of a grove of fir trees immediately invites comparison with
the image of the alder thicket in the snow. Painted thinly in oil on identi-
cally sized canvases, both pictures station you before a single, unremarkable
fragment of a winter landscape. Both are devoid of all human reference, all
traces of culture, history or plot, save whatever subjectivity is implied in
the image’s intense and centralizing focus. And both depict their objects –
bare and evergreen trees – from close up, creating a scene that is pure fore-
ground, and that therefore resists spatialization into a larger landscape, or
into a continuity of scale with your world (although the fir grove and alder
thicket appear roughly similar in size both to each other and to their
implied viewers). Such obvious correspondences between the two pictures,
the sense you have of their belonging together as a pair, only heightens dif-
ferences within your experience of each image. Against the concave strip
of snow and clods before the alders, which serves to exclude you from the
space of the thicket, the fir trees gather about a concave foreground that
surrounds you, establishing you as the grove’s potential centre. Against the
random and singular pattern of bare branches silhouetted against the sky
and viewed from one particular point, the fir grove posits a ubiquity of
order independent of your gaze and spread throughout the landscape.
Against the barrenness of the alder branches, which allow or even compel
your gaze to pass through them to an indeterminate distance of uncertain


    

substance and structure, the fir trees, ever green, form an impenetrable
barrier to your vision, inviting you to remain where you are, at the centre
of this natural architecture. And against a thin and empty world of
absences, of branches overlapped on branches overlapped upon a void, the
fir grove founds presences even in winter: the opaque boughs against a
clear blue sky, the undisturbed silhouetting of the snow-tipped foreground
saplings against the dark, snowless bases of the larger trees, the
self-presence of the viewer in a quasi-sacral space. Such contrasts tran-
scend the simple distinctions of a bare and leafy tree, frozen and partly
thawing ground, dull and cheerful sky, which might inscribe the compan-
ion pieces into some traditional allegory, say, of death and life. These pic-
tures compare not so much the objects in a world, as your experience of the
world. They display you to yourself in your various orientations toward
the things you see, the spaces you inhabit and the infinities you desire.
Thicket and grove are thus not paired primarily through analogies of com-
position, scale, canvas size or motif, but rather through their shared
address of an experiencing subject. They are linked together, that is, as
episodes in a single passage, ‘experiences’ metaphorized as moments with-
in a journey when the wanderer pauses and beholds.
In exactly whose experience, though, are these two moments finally
linked? The alders and the firs betray no evidence of earlier travellers to
their site, no sign that you, the viewer, are not the first and only person to
pause before these winter scenes. And yet something in these canvases
eludes the immediacy of your experience, insisting that the firs and alders
are not, and never were, moments within your life. Each picture depicts
a radically unremarkable nature, purged of human meaning and there-
fore of any clear relation to yourself, within a composition so centralized
and intensely focused that it appears endowed with a quite particular and
momentous significance. This significance eludes you, and you stand
before the pictures as before answers for which the questions have been
lost. They are fragments of an experience of nature elevated to the level
of a revelation, a revelation, however, whose agent and whose content have
long since disappeared.
You are placed before the grove of fir trees in the snow, just as you were
placed before the thicket of alders, and the solitude that confronts you
begins to swell. It has inhabited the empty reaches of the winter landscape,
and it unfolds past the place where the original wanderer, hesitating in his
path, took note of what nature revealed to him. This solitude expands
beyond the picture frame, now beyond this voice that speaks here. And it


   

confronts you with the image of your true arrival to the landscape, your
embarkation on a Winterreise: while you are placed before these winter
scenes, the foreground snow before the alders and the firs lies empty still.

In a very simple sense, Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of the thicket

and the grove, now kept in Dresden and Munich respectively, are linked
together by a subject anterior to the viewer. At around , the two can-
vases hung in a private collection in Stuttgart, where they bore the title
Aus der Dresdner Heide I and II (From the Dresden Heath I and II). Their
owner was a descendant of one of Friedrich’s first and most ardent sup-
porters, the Berlin publisher and nationalist Georg A. Reimer, who was
born in the artist’s own hometown of Greifswald in Swedish Pomerania
just two years after Friedrich’s birth in . Reimer must have purchased
the works sometime around , when they seem to have been first
exhibited in the Leipzig Easter Fair. From the Dresden Heath probably
represents Friedrich’s original title for his paintings, or at the least it can
instruct us on the nature of their pairing as it was understood by nine-
teenth-century viewers.
The title, which distinguishes between the two canvases merely by the
numerals I and II (corresponding, respectively, to the fir grove and alder
thicket), neither names the specific objects represented, nor does it specify
their precise semantic content or their placement within a traditional image
cycle (for example the Seasons, Times of the Day and Five Senses). Rather,
it names their common origin, as things derived ‘from’ the flat wastelands
outside Dresden. Such a localization might seem strange at first. The grove
and thicket themselves betray nothing of their specific geographical site.
Indeed Friedrich’s radical reduction of the visual image to an isolated frag-
ment of insignificant nature functions precisely to obscure the landscape’s
legibility as topography or ‘view’. The painting’s early title, however, is not
meant to identify the images as recognizable depictions of characteristic
Dresden sights. Instead, it fashions for Friedrich’s canvases a specificity of
a very different kind. On the one hand, by asserting that these firs, these
barren alders covered with snow, were objects seen on the Dresden heath,
the title intensifies a quality of singularity per se. In the painting of the alder
thicket, Friedrich conjoins an extreme randomness of detail with a central-
ized and symmetrical overall design in order to assert that the pattern of
branches silhouetted against the sky captures this particular thicket as seen
by a unique observer from a single spot in space. At this level, the title
merely adds to the work’s demonstrative or deictic character by referring to


    

the represented terrain by its proper name. On the other hand, while the
title indicates the common derivation of both canvases ‘from’ the Dresden
heath, it leaves open the precise relation between painted image and natu-
ral source. The preposition ‘aus’ signals a movement away from origins. It
extracts the paintings from the specific places they represent, confronting
their viewer not with the immediate prospect of a scene upon the heath (for
then the canvases would have been better called On the Dresden Heath) but
rather a memory or after-image of that scene. From the Dresden Heath
indicates not so much the space of Friedrich’s canvas as their time, their
unique source within a singular temporal experience of nature.
The title imagines for Friedrich’s panels an originary experience, uni-
fying the separate scenes through a plot that runs something like this. The
artist, who is the implied subject of the landscape, i.e. its initial viewer and
its ultimate theme, wanders upon the Dresden heath, halting occasionally
before views of unremarkable nature. The canvases represent the content
of these pauses, although not in the manner of images produced immedi-
ately in the landscape. From the Dresden Heath does not, in other words,
denote paintings done ‘after’ reality, as in the seventeenth-century Dutch
theorist Karel van Mander’s lapidary term for descriptive art, naer het
leven (‘after life’). Rather, it signifies something wrested from nature: not
pictures brought back to the city from the artist’s travels in the country-
side, but memories of that travel somehow refashioned into pictures.
We know something of the artistic process whereby Friedrich derives
his paintings from an experience of nature. In the upper right of a sheet
dated ‘den t Aprill ’, the artist has sketched in pencil the precise
form of a fir tree as it rises above the undergrowth (illus. ). Towards the
base of the page we can discern a further reduction of motif, in which
parts of three different boughs are studied simply for the particular
arrangement of their twigs. The sheet belongs to a small sketchbook, kept
now in the National Gallery in Oslo, consisting mostly of such drawings
of individual trees, shrubs and branches executed from life. These are
the images produced directly in the landscape, naer het leven, as it were,
yet the results are curiously lifeless and distanced. Friedrich abstracts his
motifs from their surroundings, setting down their outline somewhere on
the blank sheet of paper. Radically unframed and deliberately purged of
any perspectivizing construction of continuous space, these sketches are
far removed from that heightened subjectivity discerned in the paintings
of the alder thicket and fir grove – far removed, that is, from the sense that
what we see is an object already viewed by, and therefore always organized


   

 Study of Fir
Trees,  April
. From the
Sketchbook of ,
sheet , National
Gallery, Oslo.

around, a prior observer. Although produced in the midst of the artist’s

wanderings, the Oslo sketches seem to fragment lived experience, to
sequester the visible world from the contingencies of a human observer.
At one level, Friedrich’s interest here is simply to register the shape of a
natural object in its particularity by tracing its singular pattern on a sheet
of paper. Once committed to paper, these transpositions serve as the raw
material for finished paintings which are executed outside nature, in the
closed and urban space of the artist’s atelier. Indeed Friedrich seems to
have used the sketch of the fir at the top of the Oslo sheet for the central
tree of his  painting From the Dresden Heath I.
The attention focused on random detail in that canvas, and the atten-
dant sense we have that the painting captures the absolute singularity of
its object, thus emerges out of an interplay between nature study and
finished work. Extracted from the totality of the landscape and deposited


    

on the study sheet as unique fragments, the Oslo sketches are blueprints
of the particular itself. This particularity is embodied not only in the
drawing’s attention to the sheer irregularity and therefore uniqueness of
each object in nature, but also in its explicit connection to a unique
moment in time, through the artist’s prominent inscription of the precise
date of execution. The date testifies, among other things, to the embed-
dedness of representation in the artist’s lived experience, even if the
drawing itself, in its abstract and fragmenting quality, fails to fully
express that experience at the moment of its occurrence. Once integrated
into a fully represented ‘scene’, in this case, the rigorously framed and
ordered oil painting executed some twenty-one years later, the nature
study refers the work of art back into its original temporal moment. The
belatedness of this reference, the fact that the tree only appears as some-
thing seen, something experienced, long after it is seen no more, is perhaps
registered in the painting’s season. Among the many reasons for Friedrich’s
preference for winter landscapes is their appropriateness for staging such
references backward in time, such plays between the originary, but unrep-
resentable, fullness of experience and the retrospective construction of
art as experience, Experience, as far as we can see it, unfolds long after
its time.
The pendant canvases From the Dresden Heath represent early, though
troubled, examples of what later German thought would call Erlebniskunst:
that is, art (Kunst) that comes from, and is an expression of, experience
(Erlebnis). It is hard today to imagine a painting that would not be thus.
That a great work of art is the transposition of experiences, that this trans-
position is founded upon an artist’s unique inspiring genius, and that we,
the audience, ourselves regard the encounter with the work as our experi-
ence – these are assumptions that have become self-evident since the
nineteenth century, indeed since the advent of a Romantic aesthetics, whose
most programmatic practitioner in the visual arts is Friedrich. Erlebniskunst,
however, is only an episode in the total history of art. Before Friedrich, pen-
dant canvases like From the Dresden Heath I and II would have been linked
together as episodes in legend or history, as distinct stages within a natural
cycle (Seasons or Times of the Day), as examples of discreet types of land-
scape (heroic, pastoral, elegiac, etc), or as natural analogues to differing
human characters or qualities (the Four Humours, the Five Senses). Each
image would correspond to a separate category within a system whose
perimeters coincide with the whole of nature or humanity. Such images
will undoubtedly become experiences for us, yet in the universality of the


   

systems they articulate, which will always include more than the particular
case of the individual viewer or artist, they intend a mode of reception dif-
ferent from that of Erlebnis. Friedrich’s two canvases, on the other hand, are
paired as exemplary moments within a single continuity of experience: the
artist’s personal Erlebnis of landscape. It may be that the very exemplarity
of the thicket and grove relates to their resonances within more objective
and universal categories, for example, that the barren alders might represent
the pastness of the pagan past (perhaps also invoked in the double meaning
of Heide as ‘heath’ and ‘heathen’), while the evergreens could refer to the
continuing promise of the Christian faith. This is the opposition that
informs, for example, Friedrich’s earliest surviving pendant oils, Cromlech
in the Snow and View of the Elbe Valley from  (illus.  and ). Against
the boulders of a pagan grave and its surrounding oaks, the artist sets a
mountain summit with fir trees, anticipating his most controversial Christ-
ian interpretation of landscape, Cross in the Mountains. In From the Dresden
Heath, however, such religious categories must ultimately be subsumed
under the concept of experience. For in the obscurity and eccentricity of
their reference, they will always seem to us as at most possible motivations
for Friedrich’s initial pause before these objects on the heath.
Experience, which alone fashions the grove into a pendant to the thick-
et, is imagined as pauses within a journey through inhospitable nature. The
framed and centralized structure of Friedrich’s images may suggest that
there is a reason for these pauses, indeed that the winter landscape, while
resolutely not a home for the human subject, nonetheless has some place,
or at least some message for him. Such signs of belonging are, though,
unstable, being ordered around and contingent upon the particular place-
ment of the eye before the scene. Belonging would disappear at the
moment when the subject of the landscape would step forward to enter the
scene, or when he would embark again on his winter journey. What renders
the symmetry of the fir grove uneasy, for example, is our dizzying sense
that, were we able to glimpse beyond the edges of the picture, we would
discover a forest of fir trees stretching endlessly and without order into
space. The grove’s structure, its apparent accommodation of the viewer, is
not something discovered within the landscape. It is a peculiarity of the
viewer’s placement, which is to say it is an order located in experience, or
better: experience ordered as if it were moments of belonging.


 2
The Subject of Landscape

Ordered as if experience were belonging, for Friedrich always demon-

strates the fragility of such illusions. In a small canvas, Hut in the Snow,
produced a year before the pendants From the Dresden Heath and kept now
in Berlin, what is experienced is the passage between belonging and
estrangement (illus. ). Again we are placed before something unremark-
able in the dead of winter: a ruined hovel on the heath. Built perhaps as a
hay shed, the hovel, hardly a hovel, decays into wilderness, appearing
scarcely built at all, rotting wood enclosing an overgrown and hollow
mound. Yet stationed at the centre of the canvas, and affording a dark
place of entrance for our gaze, this hint of an interior, however uncertain,
evokes the promise of refuge from cold, inanimate nature. The hovel, that
is, offers a vision of dwelling that halts the subject in his passage through
the landscape, contrasting with his wandering the condition of arriving at
and remaining in a place. This clarifies the radically reduced plots of From
the Dresden Heath. The objects of Friedrich’s attention – the ruined hut,
the embracing architecture of the fir grove, the thicket with its foreground
burrows – express a thwarted reciprocity with the world. They recollect
an at-homeness which only intensifies our estrangement from their win-
try surrounds.
In the ruined hovel and its landscape, Friedrich represents a passage
from refuge to exposure, culture to nature, life to death. The hovel
stands abandoned and overgrown, the remnant of its door already engulfed
by vegetation. The hay it shelters emblematizes, through the biblical
metaphor ‘all flesh is grass’ (Isaiah :), the evanescence of human life
itself. And the surrounding trees, scarred by years of cropping, are ruins
now, their recent branches left unharvested. Significantly, Friedrich’s art
labours against such dissolution. Placing the hovel’s apex precisely on the
central axis of the canvas, and reciprocating its sloping sides with the fan-
ning branches of the trees above, the artist restores and monumentalizes
the hovel’s architecture, as if painting itself were the construction of a
refuge. Friedrich’s hovel, grove and thicket, however, aspire to ever greater


   

states of emptiness, their fearful symmetries enshrining so little in which

to dwell that we as viewers feel ourselves witness to a dissolution of the
subject of landscape itself.
This dissolution is momentous for the history of art. Before Caspar
David Friedrich, no major Western artist had fashioned canvases as empty
as these. Contemporary viewers wondered at the disorienting barrenness of
Friedrich’s landscapes. The artist’s friend and follower Carl Gustav Carus
(–), for example, recounts how cultured visitors to Friedrich’s
studio sometimes mistook his mountain scenes for seascapes, or praised
pictures which they viewed ‘upside down on the easel, mistaking the
dark clouds for waves and the sky for the sea. These early anecdotes of
Friedrich’s reception, anticipating the legends of abstract painters in our
century, recuperate for us the historical strangeness of works like From the
Dresden Heath. They indicate that the barren scenes of thicket, grove and
hovel were achieved only through a deliberate and epochal purgation of
landscape painting’s subject. What is the intended goal of this askesis?
What are Friedrich’s canvases the experience of?
One answer provided by the artist’s own writings and subsequent lit-
erature about his art, is that his landscapes mediate a religious experience.
Friedrich empties his canvas in order to imagine, through an invocation
of the void, an infinite, unrepresentable God. The precise nature of this
divinity, as well as the rites and culture that might serve it, remain open
questions, yet the religious intention in Friedrich’s art is unmistakable.
The artist once remarked about his painting Swans in the Rushes, ‘The
divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand; there I represented it in the
reeds.’ The small canvas thus interpreted, kept now in Frankfurt, depicts
its subject from within, from a perspective level with the swans (illus. ).
The dense reeds that fill the scene appear to tower over us, while we, as if
imploded into the tiny foreground space, are offered neither ground on
which to stand, nor a horizon to steady our gaze. Friedrich illuminates this
diminished prospect with the mere glow of the moon and evening star, so
that the eye, even once accustomed to the dark, struggles to recognize
silhouettes, sheer blanks and tiny specks of light. Friedrich’s own remark
about Swans in the Rushes interprets these reductions pantheistically, as
demonstrations of God’s presence in everything, however small. Yet the
presence of God seems finally at odds with the painting’s absences, its lack
of colour, light, space and ground. Swans in the Rushes evokes rather the
longing for the infinite. Our gaze that, thwarted by the reed-bank, passes
from earth to moon; the dark surface of the canvas which, refusing


    

 Swans in the Rushes, c. –. Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt.

entrance, keeps us outside looking in; and the swans who sing sweetest
when they yearn for death – these indicate a negative path, in which God
cannot be found in a grain of sand, but at best in the unfulfilled desire that
He be there.
A cycle of landscapes, produced by Friedrich around  chronicles
this desire (illus. ,  and ). Like the thicket and grove of firs, which
were recognized as pendant scenes only through their shared title From
the Dresden Heath, these canvases neither illustrate a single legend or
history, nor do they conform to any traditional image sequence. Their
linkage, documented only in a letter of  by an admirer of Friedrich,
is suggested visually in similarities of scale and general arrangement, as well
as in the presence of a human figure who inhabits each scene variously.
In one of the canvases, recently acquired by the National Gallery in
London (an almost identical canvas, believed now to be a contemporary
copy after Friedrich, hangs in Dortmund), Friedrich introduces explic-
itly Christian elements. These furnish the landscape with a plot, which
can then be read back into the other pictures, fashioning them into stages
in a single process culminating in the scene shown in Winter Landscape
with Church.


   

 Winter Landscape, . Staatliche Museen, Schwerin.

A wanderer sits propped against a boulder before a large crucifix rising

from a grove of snow-capped firs (illus. ). At the foreground to the right,
two crutches mark the path he has taken, at intervals, suggesting that they
were cast off. While all stands now at rest, these crutches suggest a theatri-
cal prehistory for the scene, in which the traveller, in ecstasy or exhaustion,
discards his supports one by one as he approaches the Cross. The various
stories conjured up – the cripple healed by his faith, Everyman throwing
off the crutches of an earthly existence to die in Christ – are so familiar, so
sentimental that we might be content to leave the traveller where he is, in
a shelterless winter landscape empty now of a homeward path. We do not,
that is, envisage a future moment when the traveller, rested and comforted,
turns and gathers up his strewn props to leave the scene. This is the end-
point of his journey. And as if to answer his prayers, or to settle the scene’s
account for us, Friedrich raises a spired building, a church, baseless and in
pure silhouette, above the lost horizon. Rhyming visually with the grove
that encloses the crucifix, and rising to precisely the height of the tallest
fir, the structure of the church clarifies the symmetry and order of the
natural world, both in this canvas and in all of Friedrich’s works where


    

the holy is indicated as potentiality. The vision of the Church, we shall

learn to say, discovers the fir grove as a symbol of the divine, even as the
carved crucifix already uses nature for its ministry.
Significantly, the church does not command the composition of
Friedrich’s scene as a whole. Placed off to the left, its own symmetry
ordered around its tallest spire, it forms a single flank of a bilateral sym-
metry centred on a small fir tree rising at the centre of the canvas,
between the church and the taller fir to the right. Friedrich’s canvas thus
fashions its own altar, in which the church and grove with crucifix are
wings perfectly balanced around an unremarkable tree. It is not coinci-
dental that this central fir would have covered the wanderer’s view of the
cathedral as he approached the fir grove from the right. From this inner
perspective of the scene, the church is not fulfilment, but hidden prom-
ise, which explains why the traveller should be resting here in the land-
scape, rather than seeking hospice further on. For us as viewers of
Friedrich’s landscape, the Church has other valencies. Fashioning a rela-
tion to the other objects in the scene, it explicates their meaning and their
kinds of meaning. The fir trees, carved crucifix, and visionary church
form a spectrum of divine presences in the landscape, from the merest
suggestion of the sacral in the gothic geometry of the fir grove and in its
potential symbolisms (e.g. the evergreen as eternal faith), to the tradi-
tional human icons of God made man (the wooden cross as work of art),
to a full eruption of the sacred (the visionary church that transcends the
landscape’s very ‘naturalism’). Like traditional representations of heav-
enly Jerusalem, Friedrich’s church aspires to be the end through which
all means – natural, historical, pictorial, and experiential – discover their
true sense.
But then the London canvas’s aspect as teleology is already given in its
placement in Friedrich’s cycle of landscapes. Partly through their season,
partly through their placement within a plot revealed by the London
scene, the other two pictures line up as prior stages in the life of nature
and of man. In what probably is the first picture, the human figure
appears as hunter in a wooded scene (illus. ). Flanked by two living oaks
equidistant from the scene’s borders, he aims his gun from the very cen-
tre of the scene’s foreground. Earliness here is registered not only
through the scene’s abundant foliage, but also through the way the human
figure inhabits the landscape. Almost hidden from our view by the dense
undergrowth, the hunter expresses a remaining oneness with the world,
while his destructive occupation suggests, perhaps, the recklessness of


   

 Landscape with Oaks and Hunter, . Stiftung Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur.

youth. In Winter Landscape, now in Schwerin in Germany, Friedrich

evokes a mood of greatest desolation: a wanderer on crutches halts
between two oaks, now ruined, and gazes into the winter landscape (illus.
). What has captured the traveller’s attention remains uncertain, for here
trees, ravaged and mowed, give no sign of life or consolation. And unlike
the ordered, symmetrical firs of the London panel, with their echo of the
visionary cathedral, the oaks flanking the traveller veer off wildly out of
the picture, while the surrounding stumps jut from the earth in random
configurations, like gravestones in a churchyard without a church. Such
disordered and macabre nature is, however, appropriate to the wanderer’s
attitude for, exposed and in transit, gazing into a viewless prospect, he is
now a seeker.
The plot and structure of Winter Landscape with Church (illus. ) dis-
covers what he is seeking: not only belonging in Christ, which means a
passage out of wandering, temporality and death, but also a gathering of
symmetries. In the way crippled Everyman is answered by Christ of the
Passion, and in the way believer and carved crucifix, viewer and work of
art, fir grove and church, nature and art, faith and salvation are perfectly


    

paired, Friedrich dramatizes in the landscape the reciprocity that should

occur before it: between landscape painting and its sacral meaning, between
you and the painted object of your gaze.
Is this, then, the subject of Friedrich’s landscapes? In From the Dres-
den Heath, did we simply not see that the ruined alders were just a station
along the way, and that the fir grove, shaped as if to house a crucifix,
appears empty while its essence or Idea lies a little further onward, as a
visionary church? Clearly the figure on crutches who gazes into the waste
in the Schwerin Winter Landscape enacts the very situation implied by
Friedrich’s much later pictures of thicket and grove: the artist-traveller
upon the heath, halted in the landscape, registering through his presence
that what we see is not nature, but the experience of nature belatedly re-
imagined. Clearly, too, the resolution achieved in Winter Landscape with
Church maps one trajectory of that experience in which the human sub-
ject, once hunter, then spiritual seeker, ends his search in God. And since
the church remains hidden from the wanderer’s view by the small but
centralized tree at his side, the grove of firs in From the Dresden Heath,
too, might configure a similar arrangement. The wanderer’s perspective,

 Winter Landscape with Church, . National Gallery, London.


   

internalized into the structure of the painting-as-experience, has now

become our own.
Yet what is momentous about Friedrich’s art within the history of
painting, and what marks his artistic progress from  to  and
beyond, is that he prefers to leave us here, on this side of the fir grove in
winter, denied the view of the church, the divine, the Idea, determinate
meaning, belonging. The subject of landscape, what Friedrich’s canvases
are finally about, remains always only almost visible. The fog that wraps
the Church’s base, the mute firs that conceal their symbolic significance:
these often function to turn the landscape back on the viewer, to locate us
in our subjectivity as landscape painting’s true point of reference. While
the plot of this cycle leads to the Gothic cathedral, a sign both of divine
presence and of an earlier kind of art that could embody divine presence,
Friedrich fashions in his landscapes a different itinerary, one in which we
dwell in all the intermediate spaces, where religion would be merely a
remembered promise. ‘I lost the love of heaven above, I spurned the lust
of earth below’, wrote the poet John Clare. To navigate this purgatory,
where the artist fashions his works again as altars but must leave out the
gods, is part of the historical project called Romanticism.


 3
Romanticism

What does it mean to say that Caspar David Friedrich is a quintessentially

Romantic painter? Certainly his paintings embody a range of tastes, beliefs
and attitudes commonly associated with the historical movement termed
German Romanticism: a heightened sensitivity to the natural world,
combined with a belief in nature’s correspondence to the mind; a passion
for the equivocal, the indeterminate, the obscure and the faraway (objects
shrouded in fog, a distant fire in the darkness, mountains merging with
clouds, etc); a celebration of subjectivity bordering on solipsism, often
coupled with a morbid desire that that self be lost in nature’s various
infinities; an infatuation with death; valorization of night over day,
emblematizing a reaction against Enlightenment and rationalism; a nebu-
lous but all-pervading mysticism; and a melancholy, sentimental longing
or nostalgia which can border on kitsch. Certainly too, the German
Romantics, that loose group of writers and intellectuals who, around ,
began using the term ‘romantic’ to denote what they invent, considered
Friedrich as one of their own, Ludwig Tieck, the group’s most urbane,
productive and versatile talent, once recalled a conversation he had with
Novalis about painting. Tieck noted that while at the time (c. ),
Novalis’s views seemed quite unintelligible, the artist Friedrich ‘later, out
of his own rich poetical character’ was able to make these ideas ‘largely a
reality’. For a while, at least, the Romantics could praise Friedrich’s land-
scapes as the visual embodiments of their ideas; which would also mean
that his was an art of the idea, and therefore of its cult, the philosophy of
German idealism.
What exactly were those ideas that Tieck felt had been fulfilled by
Friedrich? Clearly Novalis could not make them intelligible in conversa-
tion, nor did Friedrich know them before he made them real. Tieck insists
that the artist realized them autonomously, through his unique genius.
Friedrich’s Romanticism, therefore, is not a conscious adherence to a
distinct project already understood by the Romantic ideology, but is the
partial realization of ideas that previously had been by their very nature


   

obscure and unintelligible. But then does this not describe the very func-
tion of the term ‘Romantic’ for the movement that bears this name? As
evocation of the faraway and indistinct, as the evocation of an evocation,
Romantic names that which is properly unnameable about the project of
Romanticism.
Friedrich Schlegel, the movement’s central and most radical polemi-
cist, wrote to his brother August Wilhelm: ‘I can hardly send you my
explanation of the word Romantic, because it would take –  pages.’
The estimated length of this explanation only ironizes, through its mock
precision, the absence of definition in Schlegel’s master term. In his most
famous text, the Fragment  from the first issue in  of the
Athenaeum, the founding journal of early Romanticism, Schlegel
describes Romantic poetry as something which, by definition, cannot yet
(or ever) be described:

The Romantic kind of poetry is still in a state of becoming; in fact

that is its real essence: that it should eternally be becoming and
never be completed. No theory can exhaust it, and only a divinatory
criticism would dare attempt to characterize its ideal. It alone is
infinite, just as it alone is free . . .

Novalis’s conversation with Tieck would have been, from this perspective,
a ‘divinatory criticism’ of Friedrich, yet Schlegel’s account asserts that
truly Romantic art is resistant to theory and criticism. Moreover, since it
is never completed as object or event, and since indeed its completion would
render it no longer Romantic, the art of Romanticism sets out partly to
defy historical analysis. To reiterate, what is achieved by calling Friedrich’s
landscapes romantic? Into what history can we inscribe his vision? In one of
his Logological Fragments, Novalis formulates Romanticism actively, not as
finished product but as future process, not as historical achievement but
as imperative:

The world must become romanticized. That way one finds again
the original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative
potentializing . . . This operation is still wholly unknown. When I
confer upon the commonplace a higher meaning, upon the ordinary
an enigmatic appearance, I romanticize it. The operation is reversed
for the higher, unknown, mystical, infinite. This becomes logarith-
mized through such a couple, receiving an ordinary expression.


 

Romantic philosophy. Lingua romana. Alternating elevation and

debasement.

To romanticize is to discover the world’s original meaning. While the

process is radically new, the sense it reveals must once have been apparent
in the world, hence Novalis’s nostalgic words, ‘one finds again’. The
philosopher Hans Blumenberg has demonstrated how, as hermeneutic of
lost or forgotten meaning, Novalis’s romanticizing implies the projection
of a literary genre on to the whole of reality: the Roman or novel, with its
perceived origins in the past languages and literatures of medieval
Christian romance. Romanticizing means simultaneously reading the
world as if it were a book, and imagining, or writing, a book that would be
consubstantial with the world. ‘This operation is still wholly unknown’
even to Novalis and his circle, for in order to render the world readable in
its infinity, romanticizing must itself be unknown, indeterminate,
open-ended. Yet is it not precisely its closure, its sense of an ending, that
makes a Roman more legible than the world? Novalis acknowledges the
incommensurability of book and world within his notion of ‘qualitative
potentializing’ as bestowing ‘upon the commonplace a higher meaning’.
For within Novalis’s logological fragment itself, the romanticizing book,
and by extension Romanticism, gets measured against the extravagance of
its aim, and receives thereby an enigmatic grandeur. ‘Alternating elevation
and abasement’, that is, occurs in the very distance between the fragment
and its project: the world-book.
It is in such a context that we can understand Friedrich Schlegel’s
famous and audacious statement, made to Novalis in a letter of : ‘For
my own part, the goal of my literary projects is to write a new Bible, and
to wander in the footprints of Mohammed and Luther.’ The early Roman-
tics founded their metaphor of a world-book upon the traditional Chris-
tian conception of God as author of two books: the Book of Scripture and
the Book of Nature. Schlegel imagines writing a book that can vie with
Scripture, and another that will explicate that other text, nature, whose legi-
bility has been lost to man since the Fall. Like Novalis’s recuperative oper-
ation called ‘romanticizing’, Schlegel’s new Bible remains pure project,
which is to say radically incomplete and therefore incommensurate to the
totalities of Scripture and world.
Romanticism inhabits this space between immense ambition and slight
achievement, between hyperbolic aims and ever-reduced means. In
answer to Schlegel’s letter, Novalis writes that the Bible should be ‘the


   

idea of every book’. Yet what the founders of Romanticism, such as

Novalis and Schlegel, wrote in order to describe their project were usually
only fragments. In the Athenaeum Fragments, the ‘Logologische Frag-
mente’, and even the letters exchanged between friends, the partializing
form of the texts deliberately shapes the fragmentary nature of their the-
oretical content. Like the antique torso or ruined cathedral, the fragment
can refer back to a whole that has passed away, and more specifically, to
pasts presumed to have been more in possession of a now lost whole (e.g.
Antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages). At the same time, detached
from its original context, the fragment now stands also isolated from its
present, thus constituting in some sense a self-enclosed and complete
whole. The signs of its rupture, the accidents and particularities of its
broken profile, become the marks of its individuality and therefore auton-
omy. This interplay between part and whole makes the fragment ideal for
articulating Romanticism’s project, or better: for formulating Romantic-
ism properly as project rather than realization. It might also alert us to the
difficulties of using the term Romantic as historical explanation for an
artist like Friedrich. More radically than any modern critical ‘discrimina-
tion’ of Romanticisms, the early German Romantics themselves claim to
author only fragments of Romanticism.
In the nd Fragment from the Athenaeum, Friedrich Schlegel writes:

The project is the subjective kernel of an object in becoming. A

complete project must be at once totally subjective and totally objec-
tive, an indivisible and living individual . . . The sense for projects,
which one could call fragments from the future [Fragmente aus der
Zukunft], is distinguishable from the sense for fragments from the
past only by its direction. In the former the direction is progressive
in the latter, however, regressive. What is essential is the capacity to
at once idealize and realize objects, to supplement and, in part, to
complete . . . [O]ne could say that the sense for fragments and proj-
ects is the transcendental component of the historical spirit.

Reading the fragment is an historical enterprise, indeed is exemplary for

historical consciousness per se, even when it is a fragment from the future.
What, then, of the fragments from the past which are Caspar David
Friedrich’s canvases?
As we have seen, the alder thicket and fir grove assume, through their
very title, the character of something wrested from a greater whole (illus.


 

 and ). The phrase ‘from the Dresden Heath’ recalls specifically a kind
of title, or more often subtitle, cultivated by the German Romantics in
which they claim for their short story, Märchen or novel, that it was taken
‘from an ancient tale’, ‘old chronicle’, etc. This conceit, derived perhaps
from a preoccupation with collecting lost or vanishing texts (such as
myths, fairy tales and folk songs, etymologies), dignifies the present work
by asserting that what we read is only part of a greater whole. It will be
the reader’s duty to ‘supplement and, in part, to complete’ the verisimili-
tude of a fragment that he reads. In the pictures of thicket and grove, the
whole from which Friedrich excerpts his motif is part subject, part object:
a physical place (the heath) and a personal experience of that place (the
artist’s travel in the landscape). These canvases are partly derived from the
drawings in his sketchbook, which is now in Oslo, in which the various
objects of the artist’s original attention, the rocks, trees, and thickets,
stand isolated from the heath on which they appear (illus. ). The canvas,
then, already represents that activity of supplementing a ‘fragment from
the past’ which Schlegel terms ‘historical’. Yet while perhaps less frag-
mentary than their sketched sources, the paintings From the Dresden
Heath retain their epochal emptiness, their reduction of landscape to the
narrowest slice of seemingly insignificant nature. What we described as
the intense particularity of the two scenes, its celebration of the acciden-
tal and specific within the shape of each represented object, however
small, is like the profile of a broken torso or ruined temple: a singularity
born from loss and fragmentation. On the other hand, Friedrich exhibits
thicket and grove as if they were wholes, constructing the canvas’s visual
field around whatever order and symmetry these objects can offer. This
operation of making the insignificant appear monumental, the empty full,
the shallow deep, is akin to what Novalis terms ‘qualitative potentializing’.
Fashioning each object as if it were the bearer of some higher significance,
as if the thicket were the culmination of a quest and the grove an altar to
the hidden God, Friedrich romanticizes the world.
‘To the religious mind’, wrote Novalis, ‘every object can be a temple,
as the ancient Augurs intended.’ The architecture of Friedrich’s fir grove,
indeed, implies such an augury. The three firs and the enclosure before
them potentially recall the spaces of Christian worship, for example, the
Gothic triptych, the church apse with three windows or Friedrich’s own
altar design of – for the Marienkirche in Stalsund (illus. ). In
Winter Landscape with Church, the landscape realizes this potential. The
wanderer discovers the icon of God in nature; and we, the painting’s

   

 Altar (Design for the Marienkirche in Stralsund), –. Germanisches

Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

interpreters, are shown analogies between fir tree and cathedral in confir-
mation of our exegetical surmise. If Schlegel desired that his writings be
Bibles, Friedrich fashions the Romantic painter’s corollary aspiration: that
his canvases be altars.
Yet Romanticism also insists that such aspirations are finally only proj-
ects, only fragmentary indications of an aspiration. It may be clear from
the writings of Friedrich and his admirers, as well as from such early,


 

overtly allegorical works as Winter Landscape with Church, that represent-

ed nature can appear to harbour religious significance. But this appearance
in Friedrich’s landscapes generally is highly ambivalent. Even in Winter
Landscape with Church the Gothic spires rise above the horizon without a
base, as things somehow contradictory to the logic of their setting; and the
wanderer, having passed through landscapes empty of divine signs, discov-
ers the icon only as he passes, in death, out of this world. More strikingly,
the alder thicket and fir grove of the later From the Dresden Heath position
us in an intermediary space, where the artist-wanderer still travels in an
empty landscape, and where belonging, arrival and meaning are at most
memories or projects, accessible only if we ourselves romanticize the paint-
ed image before us. Our own interpretative path thus far represents such
an operation. Informed partly by the logic of Friedrich’s canvases, partly
by the evidence that unfolds around them, we have deduced a course that
leads from ourselves, singled out by the landscape’s arresting structure,
through the artist Caspar David Friedrich, implied by the image’s char-
acter as Erlebnis, to his temporal moment, the culture of German
Romanticism. As we explore Friedrich’s art within its historical context,
we must keep in mind how his canvases, and Romanticism generally, char-
acterize the way meaning per se is or is not present in objects. That is,
whether we choose to read them as religious allegories, expressions of a
Romantic theory of the subject, belated experiments in rendering the
cosmos legible or commentaries on contemporary German history and
politics, Friedrich’s landscapes will remain properly open-ended, if only
because they presuppose, from the start and for the epoch which we too
inhabit, that the operation which shall interpret them ‘is still unknown’.
My analysis divides into two parts. In Part II, ‘Art as Religion’, I exam-
ine the nature of meaning in Friedrich’s landscapes in a discussion of a
single painting and the controversy it provoked. The critical reception of
the so-called Cross in the Mountains or Tetschen Altarpiece will help to
place Friedrich within the formal, iconographic, religious and aesthetic
concerns of his day. Moreover, the controversy over Friedrich’s canvas,
occurring at a turning point in the history of art criticism, demonstrates
how his art emerges concomitantly and in dialogue with the nascent dis-
cipline of art history in Germany. If, at the start of my study, I stationed
myself and the reader as the picture’s representative viewers, an analysis
of the Cross in the Mountains rediscovers Friedrich’s original audience. In
Part III, ‘The Halted Traveller’, I shift focus again, from the historical
viewer to the viewer in Friedrich’s pictures. The turned figure or


   

Rückenfigur who inhabits the foreground of so many of the artist’s land-

scapes, functions to infuse Friedrich’s art with a heightened subjectivity,
and to characterize what we see as already the consequence of a prior
experience. This visual conceit endows the picture with a complex tempo-
ral fabric. In our encounter with the Rückenfigur and his vision, we feel
ourselves late, and therefore estranged, vis-à-vis the fullness of nature.
The final chapter of the book, Déjà vu, questions the precise time, as it
were, of Friedrich’s pictures. This means, on the one hand, observing how
the artist represents landscape as a product and expression of history, both
natural and human, and, on the other hand, examining how (or whether)
Friedrich’s art can be read as the product of a specific moment in German
political and cultural life.
‘Distant mountains, distant people, distant events . . . all become
Romantic, indeed that is what Romantic means.’ Novalis, again defining
Romanticism as the indefinite, reminds us that, to Friedrich and his culture,
all evocations of the faraway, whether as infinite landscape, unfathomable
divinity or impenetrable past, belong to the same project. Art ‘historical’
analysis, the discernment of the artist within his specific time, is itself
a Romantic legacy and cannot be for us purely explanation. For it is in
the nature of Friedrich’s art that all yearnings, historical, existential or
religious, are thematized and fused into one constellation, which is the sub-
ject of his landscapes.


  
Art as Religion

‘Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter,

Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.’

But, my friend, we have come too late! The gods are still alive,
But up there, above our heads, in a different world.
Hölderlin


 Landscape with Pavilion, . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Mountain Landscape, . Goethe Nationalmuseum, Weimar.


 Cromlech in the Snow, . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.


 View of the Elbe Valley, . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.


 Tetschen Altarpiece or Cross in the Mountains, –. Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.


 Hut in the Snow, c. . National Gallery, Berlin.


 Epitaph for Johann Emanuel Bremer, c. . Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin.


 Two Men Contemplating the Moon, c. . National Gallery, Berlin.


 Large Enclosure, c. . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.


 Morning (Departure of the Boats), c. –.
Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover.


 Woman at the Sea, c. . Stiftung Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur.


 Fog, c. . Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


 Morning in the Riesengebirge, . Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin.


 The Churchyard, –. Kunsthalle, Bremen.


 Bohemian Landscape with Two Trees, c. . Wurttembergische Staatgalerie,
Stuttgart.


 Hill and Ploughed Field near Dresden, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 View from the Artist’s Atelier, Left Window, –.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


 4
The Non-Contemporaneity of
the Contemporary

Few paintings are as complexly located in the history of art as Friedrich’s

large oil Cross in the Mountains (illus. ). Painted over a period from about
January to December , the picture was the artist’s largest and most
ambitious to date. Partly because of its unusual subject matter, pictorial
treatment and intended function, and partly because of the public debate
it sparked, it established Friedrich instantly as one of Germany’s most
influential and controversial young painters. The problem which it posed
to its contemporary public is encapsulated in its alternative titles. As Cross
in the Mountains, it is a landscape painting depicting a carved and gilded
crucifix or Gipfelkreuz, such as still mark the summit of peaks throughout
Germany and Austria. The exaggerated definition of the sun’s rays, which
illuminate the sky like searchlights, may heighten the spiritual aura of the
scene and the ivy which clings to the base of the cross, improbably in such
an exposed and elevated environment, may suggest an allegorical dimen-
sion to the scene. Yet Friedrich never extends these eccentricities beyond
what could, under certain circumstances, be observed in a real mountain
landscape. As the Tetschen Altarpiece, taking its name from the Tetschen
Castle of Count Franz Anton von Thun-Hohenstein in northern Bohemia,
where the work was held in –, it suggests a function as a working
instrument of the Christian ritual. Even without its title and independent
of any evidence as to its intended use, the canvas’s basket-arch format and
heavy gilded frame invokes a tradition of sacred art reaching back to the
fourteenth century: namely, the carved and painted retable altarpiece,
with its multiple functions of glorifying the altar and the Eucharist
renewed upon it, countering through its representations the obstacles of
faith (i.e., lay ignorance of Scripture, sluggishness of emotion and weak-
ness of memory) and, at least in its Catholic contexts, labelling the altar’s
primary dedication.
Early viewers of the Cross in the Mountains, and even Friedrich him-
self, were unsure what to make of this hybrid creation. They observed
that its frame, designed by the artist himself and executed by the sculptor


  -   

 Cross in the
Mountains (design
for the Tetschen
Altarpiece), c. .
Kupferstich-
kabinett, Dresden.

Gottlieb Christian Kühn, distanced the work from the concerns and
ambitions of contemporary landscape painting. In the symbolism of the
‘predella’ (wheat, grapevine, eye of God) and crowning arch (palm leaves,
putti, star), they understood an allegorical directive for reading the paint-
ed scene thus enclosed, even if they disagreed on what exactly that fram-
ing allegory was. The ensemble’s character as altarpiece must have been
indeed more apparent to these original viewers than it is to us today, for
they were able to experience its intended orientation in space. Flanked by
fluted columns, topped by overhanging full-relief sculpture, and outfitted
with a heavy, stepped base, the Cross in the Mountains was designed not to
be hung flat on the wall, as it is today in the Kupferstichkabinett in
Dresden, but to be stood on a table as a three-dimensional object. A project
drawing for the work shows this original orientation (illus. ).
When Friedrich first displayed his finished work in his atelier in
Christmas , it apparently followed the arrangement shown in the
sketch. One of Friedrich’s closest friends and supporters in Dresden, the
Prussian General and military educator Johann Jacob O. A. Rühle von
Lilienstern, wrote an account of this exhibition and its circumstances in


   

his epistolary Travels with the Army in the Year . According to him,
Friedrich hesitated to show the work to his friends, who wanted to see the
canvas in its specially designed frame before the ensemble left Dresden.
Friedrich had designed it in sympathy with the architecture and atmos-
phere of its place of destination, which was to be a small private chapel in
the Tetschen Castle. ‘Torn from this context and placed in a room not
adapted for such a display’, Lilienstern wrote, ‘the picture would lose a
large part of its intended effect.’ Friedrich finally exhibited the work at
home, in his atelier, to a flood of curious spectators. ‘In order to counter-
act the bad effect of the totally white walls of his small room, and to imi-
tate as well as possible the twilight of the lamplit chapel, a window was
veiled and the painting, which was too heavy for an ordinary easel, was
erected on a table over which was spread a black cloth.’ This was the sit-
uation greeting the Cross in the Mountain’s first public: a landscape paint-
ing enframed like an icon, an easel replaced by a makeshift altar table, an
artist’s atelier reconsecrated as a church.
Not surprisingly, this simulacrum of the sacred elicited a mixed response.
Some joined as in a congregation not merely of the religion of art, but of
art as religion. Thus Marie Helene von Kügelgen, wife of a Dresden
painter Gerhard von Kügelgen, wrote of her pilgrimage to Friedrich’s
atelier:

Yesterday I crossed the Elbe and went to Friedrich to see his altar
painting. There I met many acquaintances, among them Chamber-
lain Riehl and his wife, Prince Bernhard, Beschoren, Seidelmann,
Volkmann, the Barduas, etc. Everyone who entered the room was
deeply moved, as if they had set foot in a temple. The loudest
bawlers, even Beschoren, spoke quietly and solemnly, as if in a
church.

The ‘bawlers’ (Schreihälse) did not, however, keep their silence once they
left the church. While admirers like Marie Helene von Kügelgen preserved
a sense of the work’s still only metaphorical sacrality within the artist’s
atelier (hence her repeated ‘as if ’), opponents found the whole affair
blasphemous. As Friedrich’s most vociferous critic, Friedrich W. Basil von
Ramdohr, wrote in the work’s first published review, ‘It is true presumption
when landscape painting wants to slink into the church and creep on to the
altars’. The artist’s friends and supporters rallied to his defence, filling the
aesthetic journals of Germany with polemics and counterpolemics.


  -   

Rühle von Lilienstern’s apology for the altarpiece narrates a story of its
commission. Friedrich had already displayed a small sepia rendition of a
cross in the mountains in the  exhibition of the Dresden Academy.
Although this sepia is lost, we can get an idea of its manner from a sheet
datable to around  (illus. ). Rather than constructing his scene as a
smooth progression into space, Friedrich fashions the landscape in a series
of abrupt, disconnected symmetries arranged around a centralized crucifix,
which stands overarched by a mountain soaring above the cloudy horizon,
its base concealed. Because of its ‘deviation from the conventional form
of landscape composition’, Lilienstern wrote, this sepia met with a mixed
critical response. One viewer, however, was enchanted. Countess Maria
Theresa von Thun-Hohenstein, née Countess Bühl, begged her husband,
Franz Anton, to buy it. The Count, who was building his wife a private
chapel in his Bohemian castle, asked the artist instead if he could refashion
the sepia sketch into an altarpiece. Friedrich, however, who ‘could only
paint and create to his satisfaction when he took up the brush out of his own
inner impulse, free from any purpose determined from outside’, at first
resisted the commission. He accepted only when his designs proved prom-
ising and when he devised a way of ‘bringing the painting into harmony
with the small chapel, and tying them together organically’ through a
specially carved frame. Lilienstern, in effect, shifted responsibility for the
altarpiece from painter to patron, at the same time preserving Friedrich’s
artistic integrity through the Romantic myth of autoproduction: that is,
the creative genius producing his work out of, as well as for, himself alone.
Until recently, historians accepted Lilienstern’s account of the Cross in
the Mountains commission, sometimes even asserting that the work was
destined not simply for a private chapel, but for a high altar of the Tetschen
Castle. In , however, a researcher discovered in the Děčin branch of
the Litoměřice State Archives in Czechoslovakia a series of letters which
write a very different history for the work. On  August , Maria
Theresa wrote to her husband the Count Thun-Hohenstein, ‘The beauti-
ful Cross is, alas, not to be had! The worthy Northerner dedicated it to his
King.’ This was the reactionary Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden, for Friedrich,
the brave Norde, was born in Greifswald, in a part of Pomerania intermit-
tently under Swedish rule from the Peace of Westphalia () to the
Napoleonic invasion (). In contrast to Lilienstern’s tale of the altar
being conceived by an enthusiastic patron, the letter of the Countess reveals
the Cross in the Mountains to have been a work conceived by Friedrich him-
self to honour his king.


   

The artist’s loyalty to the Swedish crown was probably inspired by

Gustav’s specific politics and piety. Fiercely anti-Jacobin and a foe of
Napoleon, the king brought Sweden into the European coalition against
France, remaining on the field even after Russia joined with Napoleon in
. Dresden, where Friedrich had lived since , was the place where
Gustav negotiated his alliance with England intermittently between 
and . Friedrich fervently opposed Napoleon and was so anti-French
that in  he refused to receive letters from his own brother Christian,
who was travelling in Paris and Lyons. Friedrich would have thus cele-
brated his king’s diplomatic efforts in Dresden. Gustav was also a religious
man deeply influenced by the evangelical theology of the Moravian Church.
This Protestant denomination, consolidated in the eighteenth century by
Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf but tracing its origins back to the
Hussite movement of the fifteenth century, is characterized by a christo-
centric and radically inward devotion, in which, as Zinzendorf wrote, faith
was ‘not in thoughts nor in the head, but in the heart, a light illuminated
in the heart’. In Dresden, and earlier in Greifswald, Friedrich stood close
to the religious figures who introduced the Swedish king to this faith some-
time during his travels in Germany. As a new kind of altarpiece, the Cross
in the Mountains may have been designed to reflect and encourage Gustav’s
renewed piety. Focusing on the figure of Christ, yet mediating His reality
not as objective history or theological doctrine but as a feeling elicited in
the viewer by an emotionally charged landscape, Friedrich’s canvas fits
well into the ‘theology of the heart’ of the Moravian brotherhood. Art
historians have also suggested that the sun, whose rays illuminate the sky
and emanate from around the eye of God on the predella of the frame,
might refer to one of Gustav’s personal symbols, the midnight sun. The
Cross in the Mountains becomes at once the working instrument of a faith
shared by the king and his loyal subject Friedrich, as well as a celebration
of northern piety in its political struggle against Napoleon, embodiment
of the destructive, secularizing Enlightenment.
Political events and the swift demise of Gustav’s rule made Friedrich’s
intentions obsolete. Late in  Swedish forces in north-west Germany
were defeated by the French in Lübeck; in , Russia conquered Finland,
previously under Swedish rule, and the kingdom of Denmark and Norway
declared war on Sweden; and in  Sweden’s western army organized a
coup d’état, overthrew Gustav, and declared his heirs ineligible. Late in 
Friedrich, left with his canvas and its costly frame, must have accepted
Thun-Hohenstein’s offer, and by January  Maria Theresa’s mother,


  -   

Countess Brühl-Schaffgotsche, was corresponding with her daughter about

the difficulty of transporting the work to the Tetschen Castle. Simulta-
neously, Friedrich and his circle retooled the legend of the genesis and
meaning of the work, by inventing a fiction about the altar’s ‘organic’ integra-
tion into Thun-Hohenstein’s private chapel.
The context of Cross in the Mountains does not stop shifting here, how-
ever. In the recently discovered letters of Countess Brühl-Schaffgotsche
to her daughter we learn of the mother’s astonishment over the price and
impracticality of her daughter’s purchase, for, she wrote, the work will
not hang in the Tetschen chapel, nor can it serve as altar anywhere else in
the castle. Brühl-Schaffgotsche knew that the chapel already had an altar-
piece, a panel executed around  by the Director of the Prague Art
Academy, Joseph Bergler. The story of the Cross in the Mountains’ original
sacral function began as a buyer’s ruse to encourage Friedrich to part with
his masterpiece. The artist was indeed fooled, for he planned a trip to
Tetschen to oversee the painting being installed and consecrated as a work-
ing altar. At this embarrassing prospect, the patrons wove lies. They
informed him that the altar would be set up in Prague, not Tetschen. When
Friedrich then decided to travel to Prague, they gave him the slip again, and
in the end he seems never to have seen his work in situ. What he would have
seen was the Cross in the Mountains hung in Countess Maria Theresa’s bed-
room, surrounded by smaller paintings and all the furnishings of domestic
life. Today the work hangs in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, representing
the continuing secularization of a religious image, which began when the
work left the artist’s atelier. It remains a landscape painting enframed as if
it were a religious image.

An old photograph of the Countess’s bedroom reveals that together with

Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains hung a large, framed engraving of a paint-
ing which had been exhibited in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden since
, Raphael’s great Sistine Madonna of – (illus. ). Enormously
influential for the Romantics, this Italian canvas was often taken to repre-
sent a turning point in the history of art, in which painting extricated itself
from the concerns of religion. Philipp Otto Runge, Friedrich’s only equal
in Romantic landscape painting in Germany, wrote of Raphael’s work in
:

Is it not strange that we can feel our whole life clearly and distinctly
when we see dense, heavy clouds running past the moon, now their


   

 Raphael, Sistine
Madonna, –.
Staatliche Kunst-
sammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie,
Dresden.

edges gilded by the moon, now the moon swallowed entirely by their
forms? It seems then to us as if we could write the story of our life
in images such as these. And is it not true that since Buonarotti and
Raphael there have been no genuine history painters? Even Raphael’s
picture in the gallery tends toward landscape – of course we must
understand something totally different by the term landscape.

And again:

In the art of all periods we see clearly how humanity changes, and
how no age has ever returned which already once existed. Whatever
gave us the unfortunate idea of trying to call back the art of the past?
In Egyptian art we see the hard, iron roughness of the human race.
The Greeks felt their religion, and it dissolved into art. Michelangelo
marked the pinnacle of achievement in composition; the Last
Judgement is the endpoint of historical composition; Raphael already
produced much that was not composed historically; his Madonna in


  -   

Dresden is obviously only a state of feeling, but expressed through

a well-known figure; since his time there has been no true history
painting; all beautiful compositions tend toward landscape – Guido
[Reni]’s Aurora. There has not yet been a landscape artist who gives
his landscapes true meaning, who introduces into them allegories and
intelligible, beautiful ideas. Who does not see the spirits in the clouds
at sunset?

For Runge, the Sistine Madonna stands at the end of the tradition of
Christian history painting and at the start of a new saeculum of art called
landscape. Like Romanticism, landscape can be posited only as project,
having not yet found its true practitioner. In Raphael’s canvas, Runge dis-
cerns a fragment from this future landscape art. While devoid of anything
we might now call landscape, it mediates between the ‘well-known figure’
(the Virgin and Child with saints) and something more abstract and sub-
lime, a ‘state of feeling’. Runge can observe this historical shift by reading
Raphael’s canvas from foreground to background as if it were a landscape:
from the two winged putti at the base, elements from the traditional
repertoire of religious art, through the clouds that function as the scene’s
miraculous ground, to the distance, where the clouds, transformed into an
aureole of angels’ heads, harbour rarified ‘spirits’. Runge himself repeated
this arrangement in the complex structure of his masterpiece, the small
Morning from  (illus. ). Here Raphael’s foreground angels have
become the attendant putti tossing flowers at a newborn child; the
Madonna has been partly abstracted into her art historical successor, a
baroque Aurora: and the aureole of angels’ heads is displaced to the upper
field of the picture’s decorated frame, where it appears like puffs of clouds
in a blue sky. Interpreted through such Romantic revisions, Raphael’s
canvas, present in reproduction in the Countess Thun-Hohenstein’s
bedchamber, makes some sense of the fate of Caspar David Friedrich’s
epochal landscape. If the Sistine Madonna shifted painting from religion
and the altar to a purer form of art, the Cross in the Mountains attempts
that project augured by Runge: to fashion a new landscape for a new epoch,
in which history, meaning, allegory and the idea are legible not only in
the figure of Christ on the Cross but also in the spirits of the clouds at
sunset.
Certainly Runge’s account does not explain the coincidence of an
engraved Raphael and a Caspar David Friedrich in the bedroom of a
Bohemian castle. The Countess’s interest in these particular images might


   

reflect a ‘Romantic’ taste, yet she obviously would not have decorated her
chamber intentionally as the epochal conjunction of, as it were, the first
landscape and last altarpiece. Runge’s remarks do, however, outline an his-
torical framework through which a contemporary might have understood
this final context and function of the Cross in the Mountains. The real and
fictive vicissitudes of Friedrich’s canvas demonstrated just how elusive
such categories of landscape and altarpiece, secular dwelling and sacred
chapel, art and religion were at , and how they could elude even the
canvas’s very creator. Runge asserts that painting, like humanity itself,
exists in a state of constant flux. Every epoch, unrepeatable and unique,
produces out of itself an art that is forever new. The great figures of the
past – Michelangelo, Raphael, the Greeks – cannot be models for the pres-
ent, but can at best prophesy for this age its future tasks. This curious
vision, which regards the Sistine Madonna as already almost modern land-
scape, but which cannot yet say what landscape is, endows the present
moment with an intense and volatile historicity. Modernity, again like
Romanticism, consists of fragments from the past and the future. In the
case of Cross in the Mountains, Friedrich literally enframes his deter-
minedly progressive landscape composition in a pictorial form, and there-
fore function, of a much earlier age: the retable altar of the Christian
Middle Ages. That the work never finally adorns a chapel is absolutely
fitting for the age, however, for as Runge observes, we cannot ‘call back the
art of the past’. The Cross in the Mountains resists contextualization. Any
‘historical’ approach to its function or significance must take this into
account. Even Friedrich himself must have had to unlearn the habit of
thought which defines the canvas strictly, say, as a celebration of Gustav
IV Adolf ’s policies and devotion. Confronted by a multivalency that far
exceeds the semantic richness traditionally attributed to great works of art
generally, we shall now approach Friedrich’s canvas as the sum of its var-
ious receptions in the art criticism of its time.
This criticism erupted almost instantly after the work was exhibited
in the artist’s atelier in Christmas . By  January , Ramdohr’s
censorious account filled twenty-two pages of four numbers of the society
periodical Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Journal for the Elegant World).
And within a month or two, the artist’s supporters published their defence:
Gerhard von Kügelgen, also in Zeitung für die elegante Welt, Christian
August Semler in Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Journal of Luxury and
Fashion) and Ferdinand Hartmann in the literary periodical Phoebus. Such
journals were the nerve centre of educated German society. Emerging


  -   

 Philipp Otto Runge, Morning (small version), . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

from Enlightened culture of the late eighteenth century, they were read by
a growing public hungry for novelties and eager to fight remaining preju-
dices of the day. Although their print runs were relatively small (the most
important journal of the period, Johann Cotta’s Allgemeine Zeitung, pub-
lished in Tübingen, printed , copies), their readership was far larger.
As Henri Brunswig has shown, one copy of a journal, placed in a café or in
a reading club, serviced an entire community, and a private subscriber was
expected to pass his copy to friends and perhaps the educated and educa-
tors of the small neighbouring towns. Within this network of journals and


   

readers’ clubs, every artist and intellectual was ‘aware that what he does
and what he writes will be judged and that the verdict will be widely report-
ed’ throughout all the Germanies. In the case of the Cross in the Mountains,
the debate soon expanded beyond a judgement of a particular Dresden
artist and his novel creation. On trial was a whole new culture or sensibil-
ity spreading through the German-speaking world, a sensibility that called
itself ‘Romantic’ and posed a threat to the values of Aufklärung on which
the debate’s forum, the literary journal and its educated readership, had
originally been founded.
The debate was as much about the nature and role of art criticism as
about the Cross in the Mountains, Friedrich’s chief antagonist, the Freiherr
von Ramdohr, was a Dresden critic of rather conservative tastes who,
since the s, had championed academic classicism in art. This meant
not only that he favoured order, balance and clarity of composition and
that he advised artists to copy and imitate the style and subjects of antique
art, but also that he believed that art could be reduced to a set of rational
and restrictive rules, and that these rules, once codified, could be learnt.
In this he simply belonged to mainstream European rationalism which
asserts that reason can perceive things aright, and through that perception
improve whatever needs improving. ‘The critic’, writes Ramdohr at the
outset of his critique of Friedrich, ‘becomes useful as warning: warning
to the genius, if he wants to travel upon new paths; warning to the age,
when it has either dozed off through its blind belief in the prevailing
artistic manner, or fallen under the spell of a fantastic deception or sur-
prise.’ Ramdohr’s caveat against Cross in the Mountains and the epoch that
might be duped by its enchantments has a clear prehistory. The judge-
ments he had already made in his first book on aesthetics, Charis (),
had earned the wrath of a younger generation of intellectuals who were
precisely set on ‘travelling upon new paths’. In the preface to his Herzenser-
giessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Heart-effusions of an Art-
loving Monk), Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder names ‘H. von Ramdohr’ as
the embodiment of the shallow, soulless, ‘oversmart’ critic who ‘single[s]
out the good from the bad, placing them finally all in one row in order
to view them with a cold, critical gaze’. Herzensergiessungen, published
anonymously in  and in collaboration with Ludwig Tieck, was the
book that launched the Romantic movement in Germany. Against an art
adherent to the rules of a fixed ideal, and therefore against a normative
criticism that would legislate that ideal and evaluate works according to
it, Wackenroder set the figure of the artistic genius who, by definition,


  -   

transcends all rules and who demands a criticism based on feeling and
interpretative empathy. Against the Neo-classical taste for clarity in out-
line, composition and signification, he set an aesthetic of the infinite, the
obscure, the ambivalent and the multivalent. And against the academic
emphasis on the study of Antique art, he set a plethora of historical mod-
els or inspirations, which included not only the High Renaissance in Italy
but also Gothic art of the German Middle Ages as embodied, for the
Romantics, by Albert Dürer. When Ramdohr beheld Cross in the Mountains
in the artist’s darkened studio in Dresden, he discerned at once its kinship
with the movement that had repudiated him. At the heart of his rejection
of this particular work’s composition, colour, subject matter and religious
ambition lay a recognition of Friedrich’s culture:

That mysticism which currently slinks in everywhere and wafts

towards us from art as from scholarship, from philosophy as from
religion, like a narcotic vapour. That mysticism which substitutes
symbols and fantasies for painterly and poetic images, and which
wishes to confuse classical Antiquity with Gothic carvings, stiff
Kleinmeisterei [by which he means the German engravers and
woodcut artists working in the shadow of Dürer], and mere legends.
That mysticism that sells word games instead of concepts, builds
principles upon far-fetched analogies, and everywhere seeks to
merely sense what it should either know and recognize or else mod-
estly be silent about.

Every reader of the Zeitung für die elegante Welt would have understood
that ‘that mysticism’ to which Ramdohr refers is Romanticism.
Ramdohr sensed that the darkness engulfing the landscape in
Friedrich’s canvas augured the end of the Enlightenment and the dawn
of a new era of the irrational that Novalis had already celebrated in his
Hymns of the Night (). He appreciated, too, that the Cross in the
Mountains represented an approach to painting radically new in the histo-
ry of art, and that this novelty had an enormous effect ‘on the great mass’
of the public. Yet, convinced that the work ‘robs the essence of painting,
and particularly landscape painting, of its most characteristic advantages’,
Ramdohr proposed to combat the painting’s subjective appeal by assessing
its achievement according to objective rules of art which he, Ramdohr, him-
self laid down. These rules were developed around three questions posed
to the work: first, how successful was Friedrich’s canvas as a landscape


   

painting; second, what is the content of its allegory, and was allegory itself
appropriate to the genre landscape; and third, was the ensemble’s ambi-
tion to serve as an altarpiece for Christian worship compatible with the
true nature of art and religion. Generalized, these points query the form,
content and function of Cross in the Mountains and provide a framework
with which to structure our analysis of Friedrich. Friedrich’s art will be
considered through Ramdohr’s categories: Chapter , ‘Friedrich’s System’,
deals with composition and pictorial form; Chapter , ‘Allegory and
Symbol’, analysing not only what certain works of Friedrich mean, but
how they mean, reads his art against a background of the Romantic theory
of the sign; and Chapter , ‘The End of Iconography’, focuses on the
question of the religious function of Friedrich’s images. In brief, Ram-
dohr, by measuring what Friedrich does against what the rules of aca-
demic classicism dictate should be done in landscape, decides against the
Cross in the Mountains as landscape, allegory and altarpiece. After the
advent of Romanticism we may have little taste for Ramdohr’s view of
what painting ought to do, yet, as we shall see, his account of what Fried-
rich does is as acute and compelling as anything written on the artist to
this day.
Herein lies one of the most curious aspects of the whole affair. While
Ramdohr succeeds in describing what is really new about Cross in the
Mountains, and competently explains the ideas that might inform the
work, Friedrich’s apologists fail miserably on both accounts. While they
agree that Friedrich’s canvas introduces something radically new into
painting, they never quite explain what this novelty is, nor do they prop-
erly address Ramdohr’s very specific criticisms as to the work’s composi-
tion, signification and intended use. But then the artist’s supporters are
not really interested in such local arguments. They set out to defend
genius per se against the burden of tradition and the constraints of the
academy, and this defence does not require a favourable judgement of
Friedrich’s canvas. Their argument with Ramdohr amounts to a reorien-
tation of the way works of art are to be judged and understood. Just as
Cross in the Mountains constitutes a revolution in landscape painting, its
Romantic defence signals a revolution in the language and practice of
art criticism.
The controversy over Cross in the Mountains represents an epochal
confrontation between a normative or universalist aesthetics, grounded
in classical rhetoric and confident in the faculties of judgement and taste,
and a subjectivistic aesthetics, whose master term is the symbol and whose


  -   

universal is Genius. Ramdohr mounts his argument by measuring

Friedrich’s canvas against an ideal of landscape painting which he posits at
the outset. This ideal is forged from ‘principles’ discerned within the work
of past masters, chiefly Claude and Poussin, who are believed to reflect an
eternally valid canon for art. Gerhard von Kügelgen, rebutting Ramdohr’s
argument, calls this method ‘dictatorial’, not only because it wrongly sup-
poses that one man can legislate what is good for another, but also because
it judges present and future art against standards established in the past. As
Runge’s account of Raphael and the rise of landscape painting shows, the
Romantics were keenly aware of the historicity of art, its embeddedness in
the particular time in which it was produced. Similarly Kügelgen, defend-
ing Friedrich’s freedom to deviate from tradition, remarks:

Throughout art history [Kunstgeschichte] we observe art consent to

varied forms, and who among us wants and is able to determine that
it might not agree to forms not yet known. Friedrich’s originality
should be all the more welcome to us, since it presents us with a
form of landscape painting previously less noticed, in which, within
its very peculiarity [Eigentümlichkeit], is revealed a spirited striving
after truth.

Much could be said about the multifarious use of the word Eigentümlichkeit
by the German Romantics. Translatable variously as ‘peculiarity’, ‘charac-
teristic quality’, or ‘strangeness’, Eigentümlichkeit relates to a complex
cluster of words such as eigen (the adjective ‘own’, as in ‘one’s own’), Eigen-
tum (‘property’), eigentlich (‘actually’, ‘literally’, or ‘truly’), and eigentümlich
(‘strange’ or ‘eccentric’). Used by Kügelgen, Lilienstern, Tieck, Novalis
and Schlegel to denote a principle of individuation, whereby everyone and
everything has its own unique existence and character, Eigentümlichkeit
functions as a key word within the Romantic theorization of identity. It
locates truth within – or better as property (Eigentum) of – the unique,
particular, experiencing and radically autonomous Self.
The notion of Eigentümlichkeit is foundational, for example, to
Friedrich Schleiermacher’s philosophy of religion. In his Monologues
(), he writes: ‘It became clear to me that every man must represent
humanity in his own way, in a particular [eigen] mix of its elements.’ And
just as each individual creates his own picture of the world, so too he fash-
ions, from his inner ‘perceptions and feelings’, a unique image of God.
Rather than studying a monolithic thing called ‘religion’, Schleiermacher


   

 Cross on the Baltic, . Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin.

is concerned with a plurality of religions, each with an individual form that

is historically and culturally determined. Friedrich, who knew Schleier-
macher personally, formulated his subjectivistic aesthetics in similar
terms. In his fragment ‘On Art and the Spirit of Art’, written towards the
end of his life and published posthumously, he speaks of the ‘Temple of
Eigentümlichkeit’ without whose power a person can do nothing great:
‘The spirit of nature reveals itself differently to each individual, and for


  -   

that reason nobody can burden anyone else with his own teachings and
rules as if they constituted an infallible law.’ Friedrich dedicates his art to
this temple, attending always to the Eigentümlichkeit of vision and the vis-
ible. From the Dresden Heath confronts us with an individuality felt both
in the enframed accidents and anomalies of insignificant nature, and in
the particularizing illusion that what we see is the personal experience of
one subject in one life. We shall see that this life – Friedrich’s biography
– evinces too a radical individuation. As the quintessential Romantic
character in his personal habits, his artistic path and his treatment by the
public, Friedrich recalls those darker senses of Eigentümlichkeit, meaning
strangeness and eccentricity. His is the predicament of Novalis’s hero
Heinrich von Ofterdingen who, at the opening of the novel of the same
name, describes his ‘singular condition’ as something which ‘can and will
be understood by no one’. The controversy elicited by the eccentric land-
scape Cross in the Mountains is but the first important critical instance of
this predicament.
In his defence of Friedrich, Kügelgen associates Eigentümlichkeit with
the artist’s quest for truth. Informing this view is a new conception of the
historicality of art: where Ramdohr and Neo-classicism judge a work
against a timeless ideal, Friedrich’s supporters interpret the Cross in the
Mountains by positioning it within what Kügelgen calls ‘Kunstgeschichte’.
Evaluated according to this method, a painting should be as unique and
original, indeed as eigentümlich, as its age. Historicism, the endeavour to
read any event or object as having a specific character engendered by the
process of historical development, emerges as a major current in German
thought during the Romantic period. It is in the critical debate over
Friedrich’s landscape that the spirit of historicism first enters into the read-
ing of a contemporary work of the visual arts.
Two aspects of historicism in the debate are of interest. First, there is
the issue of Friedrich’s ensemble of landscape painting and gothicizing
frame. Even Ramdohr suspects that the Cross in the Mountains is not wholly
independent of past art, but links up to traditions other than classical
Antiquity or French academic landscape painting. In what he regards as
Friedrich’s slavish attention to the minutest details of the natural scene, an
attention that makes the artist incapable of ordering his scene as a harmo-
nious whole, Ramdohr discerns the influence of ‘Albrecht Dürer and other
earlier masters’. Ramdohr admits that the ‘idea of stamping the German
school with a particular [eigentümlich] national character of unpretentious
truth and simple faithfulness’ is ‘attractive in itself ’; yet the manner of


   

Dürer, while appropriate to its era, has since been superseded by the
achievements of Italy and France. Some art is relative, while other art,
Antiquity and its academic heirs, remains eternal. Ramdohr observes a
self-consciously German quality in Cross in the Mountains, and surmises
that behind it lies a message of nationalism, locating the issue of histori-
cism within the politics of the period. To the Romantics, it was precisely
because the art of Dürer and the German Dark Ages appeared so histori-
cally remote, so embedded in an obsolete and vanquished epoch and culture
that it offered an alternative to a Neo-classical tradition which, claiming to
be somehow above history, offered no place for artistic originality and indi-
viduation. In , when Friedrich, the brave Norde, designed his canvas
with its Neo-Gothic frame for the anti-Napoleonic Gustav IV, the identifi-
cation with a vanished national past must also have carried a political
meaning. Against the French Enlightenment’s brutal progeny, against
Napoleon’s destruction of tradition and history, the German Romantics
could invoke a medieval past which, although dubbed as ‘dark’ by
Aufklärung, was believed to be unique to Germany. Moreover, through its
very demise in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the era of Gothic
art seemed to demonstrate that the rules of art and politics were not uni-
versal but invented by man. This historicist vision of contingency might
have encouraged Germans to believe that, out of their Eigentümlichkeit as
a people, they could create their ‘own’ state. Here we begin to discern the
ideological underpinnings of Romantic Eigentümlichkeit. In Justus Möser’s
multi-volume History of Osnabrück (–), a work which had a great
impact on German Romanticism, the state is not legitimated by religion,
reason or the rights of man, but by the particular history of places and
peoples. Such histories are chronicles of ownership, ‘Eigentum’, by which
the individual becomes what he owns and owns what is given to him by the
community into which he was born. As we shall see, the pictorial argument
of works like Cross in the Mountains, which so disturbed the French tastes
of a writer like Ramdohr, partakes of this complex. It is not accidental that
Ramdohr’s crassest invectives against Cross in the Mountains are phrased
literally as quotations in French: ‘“Ôtez-moi ce bon Dieu . . . Il est hors
d’ensemble!”’ and ‘“Votre mauvais style m’en dégoûte!”’
Secondly, the historicism of Friedrich’s supporters and their insistence
that his canvas cannot be evaluated according to a priori rules and ideals,
raises the question of how this work, or any work, can be judged at all. To
Kügelgen the answer is clear: ‘If only critics [like Ramdohr] would come upon
the simple idea of appreciating each art work according to the true-to-life


  -   

impression it makes upon the sense and the heart, and of reproaching where
it is cold, sluggish and untrue.’ The value of a picture lies in its power to move
its individual viewer. Ramdohr acknowledged the great emotional effect the
Cross in the Mountains had on its audience, yet his critical evaluation, entrusted
to the ‘higher’ faculties of taste and judgement, discounted such effects.
Steeled against the vagaries of subjective response and changing fashion, and
trained in antiquity’s timeless ideals, the Enlightened professional critic
works precisely to form and perfect the aesthetic response of his readers,
fostering in them the essentially moral faculty of judgement.
Seen from this perspective, Romanticism democratizes aesthetics. By
allowing emotion to dominate reason and education, it undermines the
authority of all evaluative institutions that are founded on absolute values,
and on the possession and transmission of acquired culture or Bildung.
Friedrich Schlegel suggests as much when he writes: ‘Poetry is republican
speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto itself, and in which all
the parts are free citizens and have the right to vote.’ Yet within this
republic, Romanticism posits a new and in its own way more rigid hier-
archy, based on the possession and recognition of genius. In his defence
of Friedrich, Rühle von Lilienstern places the creative artist above the
reproach of any critic:

All genius is of an infinite nature, and is, to itself and for all others,
the measure and plumbline and substitute for all finite experience. It
is safest to let it flourish freely, where and when it is encompassed
within the process of creation . . . It behoves genius to break new
ground everywhere, and to ripen according to its own experience, just
as it allows no rules from without to intrude upon it, preferring rather
to err in the heights and depths than to remain content in the false
ground of impoverished certainty. ‘Can genius really err?’ Genius,
never! – insofar as it is understood as the divine, creative principle.

Criticism does not instruct or measure genius, but is itself measured by it.
And what is called taste becomes simply an individual’s capacity to recog-
nize genius when it is present in art. Lilienstern affirms this principle when
he asserts that it takes a genius to know one:

Should not genius speak as much from a critic as from an artist?

And how else could the existence of genius manifest itself in the
critic than indeed through the open and natural act of his criticism.


   

The idea that genius makes both art and its interpretation possible, that
genius in understanding corresponds to genius in creation, has its origins
in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant. In the Critique of Judgement (),
he claims that ‘genius’ engenders a ‘freedom without which there can be
no fine art, indeed not even a correct taste of one’s own by which to judge
art’. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has shown, the Romantics drew the conse-
quences of this new valorization of genius as universal aesthetic principle.
Historicism revealed to them that taste and judgement vary over time.
From the standpoint of art, however, all great works are linked together as
unconscious productions of eternal and infinite genius.
If Ramdohr’s normative criticism is deemed incapable of judging works
of genius, and if the index of aesthetic value resides now in the individual’s
subjective response a work elicits in an individual beholder, what tasks
remain for the institutions of criticism? At one level, Friedrich’s defenders
claim for themselves simply the role of publicists for genius’s creations.
Thus in Kügelgen, academic ‘connoisseurs’ like Ramdohr, who see them-
selves as ‘instructors of artists and the public, are replaced by a new kind
of critic called a ‘friend of the beautiful’, who, ‘through spirited reflection
and descriptions of art works exhibited singly here and there, widens
appreciation for them and makes known those talents who remain still hid-
den’. When such a critic judges what he sees, he does so as an ‘organ of the
public, before whose eyes the work is set only so that the various comments
and judgements of the public can be brought together under one point of
view’. But the ‘friends of the beautiful’ are more than mere publicists for
hidden talent, for their inexhaustible criticism reflects something hidden
within any great work of art: an infinity of possible readings.
Friedrich’s contemporaries discerned at once that the artist construct-
ed his landscapes precisely to elicit a multiplicity of interpretations. In
responding to Ramdohr’s criticism of allegory in Cross in the Mountains,
Christian August Semler describes the unique capacity Friedrich’s can-
vases have to mean in many ways:

Among the numerous types of allegorical images there exists one

kind of image . . . in which an artist does not attempt to express a
specific sequence of thoughts, but rather puts together a few symbols
of some quite comprehensive ideas which, in their relation to one
another, indicate only something very general. Beyond this every
viewer is left to think through these relations according to his own
individual direction and feeling. In such ambiguous [vieldeutigen]


  -   

allegories, it is very possible that the artist himself interprets his

work differently than many beholders; but this does not at all
detract from the value of the image . . .

This semantic ambivalence not only does not devalue a work, but is in fact
the symptom of a work’s greatness. Semler’s reading, in which the artist
represents but one among many interpreters of Cross in the Mountains,
places the whole debate between Ramdohr and the Romantics in a new
light. The critical dispute will not, in the end, settle the matter of
Friedrich’s genius, but has already proved this genius through the multi-
plicity of judgements, interpretations and views expressed about his work.
It is in this context that we can understand Novalis’s famous statement:
‘The true reader must be an extension of the author.’ For the process per-
formed on the work by the critic is the same as that performed upon the
world by the artist. Both are fundamentally acts of reflection: the art work
as reflection of the experiencing subject in the landscape he experiences;
criticism as reflection of the viewer within the work of art. Within this
hall of mirrors, a viewer can no longer judge works of art from a distanced
or objective position, for he himself will be fashioning art. Or as Friedrich
Schlegel wrote: ‘Poetry can only be criticized by means of poetry. An
evaluation of art which is itself not a work of art . . . has no rights of citi-
zenship within the realm of art.’ Friedrich’s contemporaries appreciated
that the artist’s landscapes not only allowed for, but in fact demanded,
poetic criticism, for as one reviewer wrote in an  issue of Blätter für
literarische Unterhaltung, ‘That before the works of this artist the viewer is
himself forced to invent, in order to complete them, gives them precisely
their particular magic.’
Friedrich produced his landscape-altarpiece Cross in the Mountains at a
moment of radical change in the way art was thought to function and to
signify. In the critical debate it sparked, the conflict between a normative
and a subjectivistic aesthetic paradigm was staged for the first time with-
in the reception of a contemporary painting. What emerges as new here
is, on the one hand, a faith that great works of art should be infinitely and
eternally interpretable, and, on the other hand, the idea that such inter-
pretations should involve the placement of the work within the history of
art. These assumptions about meaning and history form the foundations
of the discipline of art history as it was born in Germany in the course of
the nineteenth century, and as it survives in the academy to this day.
Perhaps this is why, within their various criticisms and anticriticisms,


   

Friedrich’s contemporary foes and supporters articulated most of what

can and would be written about the painting until our time. For in a very
specific sense, our critical discourse finds its own prehistory in the contro-
versy over the Cross in the Mountains. In the course of our study we shall
see that this discovery of our method in its object, which is to say the
reflection of ourselves in Friedrich’s landscape, was anticipated from the
start. Friedrich paints at the origins of, and in uncanny harmony with,
modern art history. The night that darkens the landscape of Cross in the
Mountains represents the end of art as religious object stylized as the birth
of art as historical object.

A year after Friedrich’s death in , the Dresden scientist, gynaecolo-

gist and painter Carl Gustav Carus commemorated his friend and mentor
in an essay entitled ‘Caspar David Friedrich, the Landscape Painter’. Carus
opens his eulogy by describing German landscape painting at the end of
the eighteenth century. Artists of meagre talent, pandering to a fossilized
classicist critical establishment, produced

a pair of dark, mannered trees on either side of a foreground, some

ruined temple, or a rock nearby; then, in the midground, some
staffage figures mounted or on foot, where possible a stream or bridge
and a few cattle; and behind a passage of blue mountains, with some
competent clouds above: this was about what qualified as landscape
back then.

After this era of degradation and stagnation in the art of painting,

it was Friedrich who, with a wholly profound and energetic spirit,

intervened in an absolutely original manner in the desert of the every-
day, the prosaic, the vapid, defeating it with his trenchant melancholy,
out of which arose a uniquely [eigentümlich] new, resplendent-poetical
direction.

Carus links this reorientation to the ‘volcanic convulsion which, from the
year  on, transformed Europe, resounding in a special way through
both learning and art’. The French Revolution stands here both as the
enabling circumstance for, and as an analogue of, Friedrich’s art. It enabled,
because, through political rupture, it effected fundamental changes in the
taste and sensibility of artists and their public; and it was analogous to


  -   

Friedrich himself, insofar as his landscapes too represent a revolution of

attitudes towards art and artist. Friedrich’s disruptive potential was recog-
nized from the start; for the one opinion shared between Ramdohr and his
opponents was that Cross in the Mountains introduced something totally new
into the history of art.
By the time of Carus’s eulogy, however, Friedrich’s position within the
art of his time had curiously reversed itself. His last works shown at the
Dresden Academy in  demonstrated, according to Carus, ‘with what
singular and ironclad peculiarity [Eigentümlichkeit] Friedrich infused the
self-same, melancholic, ever-alive spiritual Romanticism of poetry into his
works, even through his last years’. That is, while in , Friedrich’s
Eigentümlichkeit, his difference from all other painters and his autonomy
from tradition, made him original, by the time of his death it was what
kept him in the grip of a Romantic individualism that was now passé.
Only a decade after the Cross in the Mountains, Friedrich’s art was begin-
ning to appear old-fashioned beside an ascendant variety of new styles
and pictorial approaches, e.g., the Neo-Gothic religious art of the Naz-
arenes, the ‘heroic’ landscape of Joseph Anton Koch and other German
painters in Rome, and the naturalistic landscape and history paintings
of the Düsseldorf school. Thus a contemporary reviewer of the 
Dresden Academy exhibition writes: ‘Year after year Friedrich stumbles
ever deeper into the thick fog of mysticism. Nothing is foggy or weird
enough for him, as he ponders and strives to excite the mind. His pictures
have already in part stopped being works of art.’ And in a notice from
, published in Zeitung für die elegante Welt (the same journal that
had, thirty years earlier, carried Ramdohr’s reactionary review), Dresden
is portrayed as a cultural backwater where a dictatorial critical opinion ob-
structed any ‘truly free artistic life’, and where the painter Caspar David
Friedrich still painted his ‘darkened, foggy’ landscapes, ‘sidestep[ping]
nature’s core’.
After Friedrich’s death, these landscapes fell into oblivion. His name
excluded from most nineteenth-century accounts of the history of German
art, and his canvases buried in the storage bins of various local collections,
Friedrich was virtually unknown by . It was only through the efforts
of the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert, who discovered some
of the artist’s canvases in the warehouse of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie
in , and through the huge  retrospective of  years of German
painting exhibited in the National Gallery in Berlin, that Friedrich began
to emerge as the key German painter of the early nineteenth century.


   

Rediscovered, he was at once hailed as uncannily modern for his time.

Reviewers of the  exhibition, in which Friedrich was represented by
thirty-six oils and over twenty drawings and watercolours, saw in his
treatment of light and colour an anticipation of Impressionism, while
Friedrich’s distinctly German sensibility and subject matter were celebrat-
ed as prophetic of an authentic national tradition whose triumph, these
reviewers predicted, was still to come. A century after the controversy over
Cross in the Mountains, Friedrich had once again become ‘ahead of his time’,
now to function, however, as an artistic ideal for a revolution from the right.
By , a German critic claimed Friedrich for that present age by positing
a link between the resurgence of Friedrich’s popularity and the expansion
of the German state through Nazism:

It is no accident that his rediscovery coincides with the beginning of

this martial saeculum, and that the pinnacle of his influence coin-
cides with the outbreak of the World War. No accident, too, that since
 Caspar David Friedrich’s effect has begun to grow.

At this nadir of Western civilization Friedrich’s art is represented as hav-

ing achieved its moment of greatest renown.
Of course, the phenomenon of an artist’s changing critical fortunes is
hardly unique to Friedrich. Yet the speed with which he passed, within his
life, from the avant-garde to the antiquated indicates something about his
‘historical’ position. Friedrich, for whom no time is quite right, emblema-
tizes that condition of non-contemporaneity which Nietzsche celebrated
in his early essays collected under the hermetic title Unzeitgemässe Betracht-
ungen (Untimely Meditations). According to the Romantic myth of the
artist, non-contemporaneity describes the place of the creative genius in
history. While every epoch and culture will produce its own geniuses, each
at once unique unto and expressive of their particular age, what all have
in common, indeed what elevates them above all vagaries of history to the
level of an aesthetic universal, is their estrangement from the time and
world which gave them birth. When, for example, the Norwegian land-
scape painter Johann Christian Clausen Dahl remarks about his friend and
artistic mentor that ‘Friedrich was not truly understood by his time’, he
implicitly reads the neglect of the artist by patrons and critics not as con-
sequence of changing fashions, of a culture’s short attention span for
already known styles or visions, but rather as the result of a public which,
from the very first, never really knew the artist.


  -   

The Romantic aesthetic burdens the artist with an impossible task. On

the one hand, it demands that genius should be wholly individual and
unique, capable of producing works autonomously, which is to say, out-
side tradition, independent of the limiting charges of patron and public,
and always in advance of any known interpretative and evaluative para-
digms. On the other hand, it also calls on the artist to transcend this
individuality and to found within his art a new mythology, one which
would be relevant and binding for the culture as a whole. The ideal of the
infinitely interpretable work of art, even while it valorizes subjectivity in
art’s production and reception, still imagines that there be an interpreting
community, however diverse its voices. Quite a different matter, however,
is critical neglect, which is what replaces controversy in Friedrich’s recep-
tion after around . Neglect and misunderstanding by the public, and
consequently the artist’s isolation, solipsism and retreat into an over-filled
self: these are the grimmer fates that await the artist who would embrace
Romanticism’s task. In Friedrich’s case, the painter responds with a recip-
rocal mistrust of human fellowship. ‘You call me a misanthrope because I
avoid society,’ wrote Friedrich in an aphorism addressed to his public,
‘you err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their
company.’ Friedrich’s reclusiveness, almost legendary in his own time, was
for him an attitude necessary for his art. In a text composed around 
but published only posthumously, Friedrich writes:

I have no intention of working against the dictates of the day, of

swimming against the current, when such dictates are purely a mat-
ter of fashion. Rather, I dwell in the hope that time shall annihilate
its own offspring, and that it shall do so quickly. But much less am
I so weak as to do obeisance to the demands of the age when they
go against my convictions. I spin about me my chrysalis, and let
others do the same; and I leave it to time to decide what shall come
of it, whether a brilliant butterfly or a maggot.

The cocoon, hyperbolizing the artist’s self-enclosure in the Eigentümlichkeit

of his art, evokes an organic analogue of the whole process of genius’s
unfolding in history: withdrawal from, or death to, this world of passing
tastes and fashions; metamorphosis in the medium of time as arbiter of
greatness; and rebirth in some future when the artist, fully understandable,
will be either forgotten (the maggot as Death’s attribute) or remembered
eternally (the butterfly as Christian symbol of the resurrection).


   

In Friedrich, death can represent the extent of self-sacrifice demand-

ed of an artist who would be true to himself. Writing of a certain painter,
‘XX . . . known because of his tendency to paint only somber subjects’
even against the advice of his friends, Friedrich laments how little under-
standing such friends have for the ‘inner impulses and drives of the soul’.
XX, who of course stands for Friedrich himself, can paint only what God
‘created, coined, and stamped’ him to do, which is to depict ‘with a serene
heart, sad airs and solemn, dusky landscapes’. In the face of misprision by
even well-meaning contemporaries, Friedrich exclaims: ‘Oh Father, for-
give them; for they know not what they do, for they cause the opposite of
what they intend.’ Society, instead of accepting the genius for who he is,
seeks instead to remake him in its own image, driving him further into
melancholy, a predicament compared here to the Passion. Friedrich
absolves his own epoch of the errors of its critical judgement by quoting
verbatim from the words of Christ on the cross in Luke :. At a time
when myths are founded subjectively, and when religion is framed as a
‘theology of the heart’, the redeemer will be one who sacrifices himself
not for the sake of our souls, but for the sake of our selves, our interiority.
Seen from the perspective of the artist as martyr, a scene like the grove of
firs in From the Dresden Heath is not devoid of its Passion or crucifix. In
the solitude that has infused all represented things, and in that original
fragmenting, isolating, solipsistic gaze implied by the objects we see and
by how they are seen, we can discern Caspar David Friedrich as Man of
Sorrows internalized in a ‘Temple of Eigentümlichkeit’.
Quite early in his career, Friedrich explicitly constructed one landscape
around his own grave. In a sepia from  entitled My Burial, now lost
but known to us from contemporary descriptions, an open grave, freshly
dug and marked by a cross with the inscription ‘Here rests C. D. Friedrich
in God’, appeared at the centre of a churchyard. Surrounding this were
other mounds, some displaying the names of Friedrich’s already deceased
mother and siblings. A priest, sermonizing to a group of mourners, ges-
tured towards a butterfly, symbol of the artist’s resurrected soul, in the air
above the open grave. Behind rose ruins of a certain Gothic church said to
be from ‘Friedrich’s birthplace’ (presumably the ruined cloister Eldena,
near Greifswald). And above appeared a rainbow surmounted by five but-
terflies (the souls of Friedrich’s departed relatives) fluttering before a ray
of light. It is not difficult to picture the composition, for the basic motif
appears often in Friedrich’s oeuvre, although never with such an overtly
self-referential tenor. In the scene of Winter from the late sepia series


  -   

Stages of Life, for example, a cadaverous man and woman sit at the edge of
their open grave (illus. ); and in the  Abbey in the Oak Forest, now
in Berlin, a cortege of monks files past an open grave stationed at the cen-
tre of the picture’s lower framing edge (illus. ; see also the destroyed can-
vas of Cloister Cemetery in the Snow from –, illus. ). This grave is
meant as the artist’s. In the canvas’s pendant, the famous Monk by the Sea
(illus. ), the lone figure on the shore represents Friedrich himself seen
from behind but recognizable through his lost profile. In Abbey in the Oak
Forest the artist as monk, having longed for death at the edge of the sea, is
now brought by his brothers to rest.
Contemporary viewers of My Burial could gloss such macabre ‘self ’
portraiture with an anecdote from the artist’s life. An anonymous critic of
the  Dresden Academy exhibition, where the sepia was first shown,
composed his review as a dialogue between two visitors to the gallery. One
of the speakers, a woman, remarking that the picture came from deep
within the artist’s heart, recounts a story of the circumstances behind the
scene’s melancholy subject. One winter day in his youth, Friedrich and his
younger brother went skating on a frozen lake. The brother had been re-
luctant about the outing, but Caspar David convinced him to join. When the
two were on the lake, the younger boy broke through the ice and Caspar
David, unable to help him, watched his brother drown. ‘A quiet melancholy
fell over his entire life,’ concludes the woman, ‘his art directs itself only to
objects of mourning, and he paints burial scenes in all forms, so that he him-
self, with his brother, can return to the dwelling place of peace.’ In other
accounts of the incident, the brother drowned attempting to save Caspar
David, who had himself come into danger on the ice.
The death of Friedrich’s younger brother Johann Christoffer on 
December  becomes a recurrent topos in the literature on the artist.
Sometimes it functions to explain landscapes in which nature appears as
universe of death, as in the great catastrophe scene of Sea of Ice from
– (illus. ). Sometimes it interprets the whole character of Friedrich’s
art by attributing the prevailing mood of melancholy to an unresolved but
very specific work of mourning. All the artist’s ‘losses’ – of critical acclaim,
of an ideal of German national unity, of confidence in the traditional forms
of religious faith, etc – that might contribute to his melancholic personality
and be registered in his art would then be subsumed under this formative
trauma of death. Of course, Friedrich’s personal disposition requires no
historical cause, being, as the artist himself says, ‘created, coined, and
stamped’ in him congenitally, as it were, as the Eigentümlichkeit of his genius.


   

Nor do his burial scenes demand a biographical gloss; for the fascination with
death, the depiction of the churchyard as feeling’s locus amoenus, and indeed
the whole larmoyant vein of so many of Friedrich’s works can be understood
as part of the general repertoire of sentimentality shared in Germany by both
the Storm and Stress artists of the late eighteenth century and the Roman-
tics of the early nineteenth. By linking the painted landscape to the artist’s
biography through the story of the ice lake, however, the  reviewer of
My Burial transposes a general allegory of life and death into the specific-
ity of an individual experience. Friedrich occasions this shift to Erlebniskunst
by appropriating the eighteenth-century churchyard scene literally for his
own grave, and by transforming the artist’s signature (‘I made this’) into an
epitaph (‘I was this’).
The anecdote of death by drowning is not without its own allegorical
dimensions, however. For one thing, that Caspar David is made out to have
in some sense caused his younger brother’s death, having convinced him to
venture out on to the ice, recalls the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cain’s
punishment was to wander as ‘a fugitive and vagabond in the earth’
(Genesis :), hiding from God, but unslayable because marked by God.
As Geoffrey Hartman has shown, Romantic artists recognized in Cain an
emblem of themselves. Isolated from life but unable to die, Cain exists in a
purgatory between life and death, in that state of between-ness pictured by
Friedrich in, for example, his Winter Landscape (illus. ,). Like those other
mythic solitaries of the literature of the period, the Wandering Jew, Faust
and the Ancient Mariner, the Romantic Cain bears less the mark of guilt
than of a crippling self-consciousness which increases with solitude. To
Friedrich, who in his later years felt himself scorned by his culture simply
for expressing who he was, this mark was indeed simply that of selfhood,
of Eigentümlichkeit, of being, as one acquaintance put it, ‘the oddest of all
oddities’. In the proleptic fantasy of My Burial, Friedrich might receive
what was withheld from him on the frozen lake in  and what might be
recalled in all of the artist’s pictures that stage a subjective yearning for
death: union with his brother in the beyond. Far more importantly, how-
ever, what is pictured here, as well as in works like Winter Landscape with
Church, is a release from an entrapping interiority which is ceaselessly
repeated in the mourning and autobiography of his art.


 5
Sentimentalism

Before turning to Caspar David Friedrich’s biography and artistic devel-

opment up to the Cross in the Mountains, let us set before us the artist’s
face. At around , Friedrich executed a Self-portrait in soft black chalk
for his friend, the Danish painter Johan Ludwig Gebhard Lund (illus. ).
Observing himself in a mirror, the artist has built up the subtle contours,
folds and veins of his face through a delicate and carefully crafted web of
hatching. This modelling technique, in which parallel strokes curve to
adhere to the surfaces they describe, is common in German drawings
of the period and derives from the graphic manner of French eigh-
teenth-century engravers. Friedrich, whose academic training would have
emphasized sketching from prints of works of art, thus transposes this
method of obedient copying to the depiction of his own face. At the same
time, however, the artist also animates his likeness through the curious
pose he strikes. His shoulders aligned parallel to the picture plane, his face
turned sharply to three-quarters and his eyes fixed directly outwards
towards the beholder, Friedrich depicts his body at work, engaged in the
act of simultaneously sketching, posing and seeing. The awkward diver-
gence of face and gaze affects the way we read the labour expended in the
finished drawing. Holding his body in place in front of the mirror,
Friedrich must provide his gaze with a stable object to be replicated in all
its minutest details. Yet this gaze, represented at odds with the body’s
immobile posture, betrays the difficulty of its task. The act of sketching,
the meticulous, disciplined, rigid and at bottom self-effacing operation of
modelling the visible according to an academic formula, engenders a split
within the represented body. Observing himself as he observes himself in
the mirror, Friedrich discovers and represents the struggle between his
public, visible, portrayable face, and a hidden inner energy legible only in
the gesture of the gaze.
In another Self-portrait sketch, dated  May  and kept now in
Hamburg, the artist stands before us equipped for a rather different strug-
gle (illus. ). Dressed in travelling clothes, with a makeshift visor over


   

 Self-portrait, c. .
Statens Museum for Konst,
Copenhagen.

one eye and a round ink flask dangling from his coat, this is Friedrich not
as academic portraitist, but as landscape painter in harness for sketching
outdoors. The visor, which together with his shapeless cap gives him the
appearance of a wounded soldier, probably functioned as a means to
steady his gaze. For by viewing his object only with his active right eye
(note that self-portraiture, through the agency of the mirror, reverses the
orientation of the sitter), and therefore by sacrificing the apprehension of
volume through stereoscopy, he achieves a more precise perception of
outline, which accords well with the abstract and quasi-diagrammatic
quality of Friedrich’s sketches produced directly ‘from nature’. In the
Oslo study sheet of fir trees, we recall, the aim was precisely to wrest the
object from the contingencies of viewpoint and setting, even if later on,
when the drawing would be reworked in the studio into the canvas From
the Dresden Heath, the artist would intensify the fir tree’s subjective aspect
as something seen (illus. ). Interestingly, the  Self-portrait not only
depicts the artist-traveller outfitted for sketching ‘on the heath’, as it were.
In its technique (sepia wash over graphite outline), its sober style and its


 

 Self-portrait with Cap

and Visor,  May .
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

inscribed date of execution, the Self-portrait as image also itself resembles

Friedrich’s early nature studies. Accordingly, the artist does not struggle
here to chronicle the difficult labour of representation, much less to cap-
ture an inner self, but rather depicts himself as mere instrument and
object of vision. Assembled together with those other apparatuses of
nature study, the paper visor and oval flask of sepia, Friedrich’s Cyclops
gaze, strangely impersonal, stares out at us from within a picture whose
oval format seems to echo the shape of an eye.
Friedrich’s self-portraits are staged as dramas of the gaze. In the 
likeness fashioned for Lund, the act of looking is incarnated within the
complex posture of a body simultaneously representing and being repre-
sented. And in his Hamburg likeness of , Friedrich dresses up his
gaze for the act of objective nature study, producing a self-portrait which
is appropriately purged of subjectivity. Friedrich’s most histrionic depic-
tion of his gaze, however, occurs in a remarkable Self-portrait, now in
Berlin (illus. ). Executed in black chalk and datable to around , this
sketch shows the artist at the height of his career, at the moment when the


   

 Self-portrait,
c. . National
Gallery, Berlin.

controversy over Cross in the Mountains was replaced by a general celebra-

tion of his art by the most influential critics of his age. In the Berlin Self-
portrait, the calm, youthful face of Friedrich’s  likeness has given way
to a veritable caricature of Romantic selfhood. If, as Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe wrote, ‘the Classic is the healthy, the Romantic the sick’, then
Romanticism’s disease is that of the spiritual invalid who, possessed of an
immense and impassioned interiority, dwells in a state of psychic disequi-
librium that can at any moment pass from inspired creativity to madness,
love or suicide. Friedrich expresses precisely this ‘self ’-willed infirmi-
ty of self through certain exaggerations of physiognomy and posture.
His sunken cheeks, intense gaze, wild eyebrows, hunched shoulders
and clouded brow indicate a mind alternately ferocious and vulnerable.
Friedrich, of whom the French sculptor David d’Angers wrote, ‘Voilà un
homme qui a découvert la tragédie du paysage’, depicts himself here as
tragic hero, aspiring to evoke in us tragedy’s dual emotions, pity and ter-
ror. Even more theatrical is the play of light and shadow across the artist’s
features. Friedrich’s right eye seems to peer out at us from an unnatural
darkness which destabilizes his whole face, endowing it with an uncertain


 

depth, as if something (perhaps what the Romantics termed the Nachtseite

or ‘night-side’ of genius’s nature) were lurking behind what we see.
The demonic quality of Friedrich’s gaze here owes much to the draw-
ing’s overall composition. The artist stations his left eye at the approximate
centre point of the sheet, reserving above his likeness a rather wide margin
of space. This at once intensifies the sitter’s gaze by organizing the pictor-
ial field around it and heightens the contrast between the artist’s lit and
centralized left eye, and the eccentric, shadowed and active right eye
(active because, as the Self-portrait of  documents, it was with this
eye that Friedrich scrutinized his objects). This plot of concealment and
revelation accords well with the public face Friedrich cultivated. Contem-
poraries discerned in the artist’s unkempt beard, for example, an emblem
of his melancholia and withdrawal from society. Friedrich Hartman, the
Dresden painter and early defender of the Cross in the Mountains, once joked
of this beard: ‘Whosoever wishes to see Friedrich once more should
hurry, for he soon will be totally overgrown.’ In the Berlin Self-portrait,
this veiling of the artist is augmented by that curiously shapeless drapery
which enwraps his body. As if to prophesy his future rejection by and with-
drawal from his public, Friedrich portrays himself as already ‘cocooned’
against the vagaries of time. The clothes enshrouding him are purged of
any reference to social position or contemporary fashion, and thus prepare his
effigy for posterity in a manner curiously reminiscent of the Neo-classical
portrait bust.
Commentators have discerned in this drapery other valencies as well.
On the one hand, some argue that this Self-portrait simply depicts the
artist as he really appeared when working in his atelier. Wilhelm von
Kügelgen, son of the Dresden painter Gerhard von Kügelgen, describes
how the ‘blond and Cossack-bearded Friedrich contented himself with
wearing a long gray, travelling cloak when he worked, which raised doubts
as to whether he had anything on underneath; and Friedrich’s acquain-
tances knew that he did not’. Thus in comparison to, say, Georg Friedrich
Kersting’s portrait of Caspar David Friedrich his Studio from  (illus.
), in which the artist stands before his easel dressed conventionally in
trousers and a stylish jacket, the  Self-portrait confesses to the sitter’s
private appearance, and perhaps to that nakedness known only to his inti-
mates. On the other hand, other commentators have noted that the partic-
ular shape of the artist’s garments here recalls a monk’s habit, such as
Friedrich wears in his self-portrait in figura, the Monk by the Sea from
. The two readings are, of course, compatible. Already Wackenroder


   

 Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, c. .

National Gallery, Berlin.

had transposed the values and Gothic ambience of monastic life into the
domain of art in his Heart-effusions of an Art-loving Monk, the book in
which the confrontation of Romanticism with Friedrich’s future critic
Ramdohr was initially staged. By fashioning a Self-portrait as Monk, the
artist could thus both ally himself with the Romantic sensibility which
supported his art and legitimate his own attitude of withdrawal from the
world through the model of Christian askesis. His practice of working in
his atelier with nothing on but a cloak simply accords with this general


 

self-stylization. For along with the cell-like bareness of his atelier,

Friedrich’s travelling cloak evokes both a sense of penitent self-denial for
the sake of art and a notion of the artist as purgatorial wanderer, never at
home and always in transit, even when he stands in his own studio.
However much it represents the artist as self-concealed, withdrawn
and tragically eccentric, though, and however much it heroizes the artist’s
subjective gaze over the objective visibility of his physical person, the
Berlin likeness remains a theatrical and, in the end, rather conventional
mode of artistic self-representation. The melancholy painter, betraying
his inner struggle through the divine furor of his gaze, has been a trope of
self-portraiture since the Renaissance. Given the radicality of Friedrich’s
conception of the relation between art and self, it is not surprising that,
after this, the artist never again represents himself full face, as it were. For
in place of self-portraiture as the representation of the artist’s physical
person, Friedrich proposes a more totalizing and reflexive project: the
whole of represented nature will appear as the picture of the artist’s inner
experience of self and world. At first, Friedrich registers the self-refer-
ential status of his landscapes by inhabiting them with a human figure
bearing his own personal features. The blond man with bushy whiskers
seen in lost profile in Monk by the Sea (illus. ), Morning in the
Riesengebirge (illus. ) and Mountain Landscape with Rainbow (illus. )
serves this function. While marked by features unique to Friedrich, this
figure’s gaze remains hidden, and the sublime substance of his vision has
expanded to engulf him. More typically, however, Friedrich abstracts the
identity of this internalized viewer by peopling the foreground of his
landscape with figures turned fully away from the viewer. We shall later
have occasion to analyse in depth the so-called Rückenfigur as visual mas-
ter-trope of Friedrich’s art. At this point I would simply note that these
anonymous subjects mark the landscape before them as ‘something
viewed’. In the famous  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (illus. ), for
example, the figure seen from behind may conceal from us his identity, yet
in the way the landscape appears to emanate from his heart, he stands as
source for everything we see. Eventually, Friedrich was able to do away
with even the Rückenfigur and still preserve, if not indeed enhance, our
sense that the landscape is an interiorized self-portrait of the artist.
Interiorized, for in works like From the Dresden Heath (illus.  and ) and
Hut in the Snow (illus. ), we enter into the very fabric of the artist’s gaze,
ourselves experiencing through particularized nature the radical
Eigentümlichkeit of the creative subject.


   

 Mother Heide,
c. . Stiftung
Pommern, Kiel.

In the early self-portraits of ,  and especially , Friedrich

struggled to depict what is most elusive in the human face: the active eye as
mediator of the inner self. It was in landscape painting, however, that the
artist discovered a via negativa to this end. Turning first away from the view-
er, then replacing his person with a surrogate, and finally absorbing himself
into the substance of his paintings, Friedrich depicts his gaze for what it is
to him: not something seen, but that which sees. It is in this context that we
can begin to understand the Romantic philosopher F.W.J. Schelling’s state-
ment that ‘in landscape painting only subjective representation is possible,
since landscape has only a reality in the eyes of the beholder’, and Friedrich’s
lapidary assertion: ‘The painter should not paint merely what he sees in front
of him, but also what he sees within himself. If he sees nothing within, he
should not paint what he sees before him . . . ’ Friedrich’s landscapes are per-
haps the most consciously subjective works of art before our century. Which
is to say: as speculative Idealism’s proper pictorial incarnation they represent
the ‘subject’ not as mere substance presentable to itself, as in the Cartesian
cogito or, for that matter, the self-portraits of a Rembrandt or a Dürer, but as
function of the cognition of appearances.


 Adolf Gottlieb
Friedrich, c. .
Stiftung Oskar
Reinhart, Winterthur.

 Market-place at
Greifswald, c. .
City Museum,
Greifswald.


   

All of Friedrich’s paintings, whether of self or nature or history or the

politics of the emergent German state, aim at ‘self ’ portraiture. It is nec-
essary, however, to reverse this infinite expansion and to ask what is indeed
unique about the productions of this particular self.
On  September  Caspar David Friedrich was born, the sixth
child of ten, into a family of moderate means and Protestant piety. The
father, Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich (-), was a soap-boiler and chand-
ler from Neubrandenburg in the north German region of Mecklenburg,
who set up business in Greifswald around . Caspar David’s mother,
Sophie Dorothea née Breckly, died in , and thereafter her children
were looked after by a housekeeper named ‘Mutter Heide’ and educated
by private tutors. This suggests that the father had achieved a certain petit
bourgeois affluence. But the small town of Greifswald (illus.  and ),
with its , inhabitants, was poor. As the only town in Pomerania that
had remained under Swedish rule almost continually since the Thirty
Years War, it had been the site of frequent and violent conflicts between
Sweden and, in succession, Brandenburg, Russia and Prussia. When
Caspar David’s father arrived in Greifswald, the city was enjoying a rare
period of moderate prosperity and peace, supported by its active port on
the Baltic, by various trade subsidies from the Swedish crown, and by its
university, reputed to be one of Europe’s worst. It was by means of this
last institution that Friedrich began his early training as an artist in 
through the University Drawing Instructor Johann Gottfried Quistorp
(–).
Quistorp’s pedagogical method was typical of the period. In theory, as
he wrote in  in a letter to Runge, he opposed artists who ‘slavishly
imitated’ the art of their predecessors, or adhered blindly to the ‘prattle
about rules’, a stance which allied him to the Storm and Stress movement,
with its valorization of originality over imitation. In practice, however,
he demanded that his students begin their training by copying from
model-books and from prints of old masters, for only thereby could a
young artist acquire what Quistorp called ‘the mechanical aspect of art
which is so difficult to bring forth from oneself ’. Quistorp was equipped
to offer this kind of training, since he possessed an extensive art collection
which encompassed some fifty paintings and , drawings and engrav-
ings, including works by Hans Holbein the Elder, Palma Vecchio, Jan
Gossaert, Adam Elsheimer, Anthony van Dyck, Adriaen van Ostade, David
Teniers, Charles Lebrun and Jakob Philipp Hackert. Thus however
provincial Greifswald may have been, Friedrich had access to a very wide


 

 Male Nude Seen from

Behind, –. City
Museum, Greifswald.

range of pictorial traditions. Interestingly, the few surviving works by

Friedrich from this period – a group of formulaic outline drawings in a
late Baroque manner copied from Johann Daniel Preissler’s model-book
Praxis Invented through Theory (–) – document how far back in the
European tradition Friedrich’s early training under Quistorp reached.
Friedrich seems not to have distinguished himself in this context. His
Male Nude Seen from Behind, for example, with its awkward treatment of
the figure’s feet in relation to the ground-plane, its misjudgment of the
structure of the staff-bearing arm and its rather illegible depiction of
the back of the figure’s head demonstrate the aspiring artist’s struggle
with the tasks assigned to him (illus. ). It is perhaps in reference to such
an ‘invented’ praxis as Preissler’s that Friedrich was to write, some thirty
years later, ‘a picture must not be invented, but rather felt.’
Quistorp’s influence on Friedrich was not limited to exercising the
young artist’s draughtsmanship, however, but also involved exposing him
to that culture of ‘feeling’ which would inform Friedrich’s mature aes-
thetic. Quistorp’s circle included the pantheistic philosopher and historian


   

Thomas Thorild (–) and the poet, theologian and pastor of

Wolgast, Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten (–). Kosegarten, who
was highly celebrated in his day and whose first volume of poems was
illustrated by Quistorp, preached a particular theology of the heart, in
which the subjective experience of nature’s primal, and therefore divine-
ly created, beauty leads to a direct experience of God. Kosegarten’s faith
found its most important expression in his so-called Uferpredigten
(‘Shore-sermons’). Staged outside in nature, Christian worship utilizes
only the landscape for its services, treating the various elements of nature
loosely as symbols for the personages, instruments and doctrines of faith.
Typically, Kosegarten set his shore-sermon in Rügen, a large island in the
Baltic off the coast of Pomerania, for in this bleak and ascetic landscape
the poet found a natural reflection for his own self-consciously Northern
piety. In the third eclogue of Kosegarten’s verse epic Jucunde (), for
example, the heroine’s father, a village pastor, preaches to his flock ‘in the
greening valley by the coast’, accompanied only by the ‘trumpets of the
sea and the many-voiced pipe organ of the storm’. The pastor’s
shore-sermon opens with a creation story, in which God infuses himself
into his created symbol, the sun, which is described as ‘the visualized
image of the hidden Father/ Who dwells in the light that blinds all those
who approach.’ The prayer avoids a fully fledged pantheism, however, by
closing with a nay-saying of the visible world:

Look to on high, you loved ones! Not on the colourful

Blossoming clod of earth that feeds you, limiting your gaze.
In the vapours
Of clammy sludge let not the wings of spirit dwell.

Kosegarten’s shore-sermons stand close to Friedrich’s art, both in their

specific settings and in their characteristic turn of thought, which at once
affirms and negates God’s immanence in nature. Heinrich von Kleist
observed an analogy between Friedrich’s landscapes and the Wolgast
preacher’s poetic theology when he wrote of the ‘Kosegartenian effect’ of
the  Monk by the Sea (illus. ).
Kosegarten seems himself to have recognized his affinity with
Friedrich, for he was one of the earliest collectors of the artist’s works,
and in  he even invited the painter to execute an altarpiece for the
‘shore-chapel’ in Vitte. Friedrich, in turn, found in Kosegarten’s Rügen
the locus of artistic election. For, as Helmut Börsch-Supan demonstrated


 

 Rügen Landscape: The Jasmund Meadow, near Monchgut by Vilmnitz,

 June . Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.

in his  analysis of Friedrich’s pictorial structure, it is in the sketches

fashioned during his first trip to the island that Friedrich makes his most
important compositional breakthrough. In a sketch of the Rügen
Landscape: The Jasmund Meadow, dated  June , for example,
Friedrich does away with both conventional framing devices (flanking
trees, a foreground ruin, etc) and with markers measuring the scene’s
smooth recession into depth, producing a nascent version of that disori-
enting, boundless space characteristic of his major works from  on
(illus. ). And in the sepia View of Arkona of –, the artist constructs
the coast of Rügen so that we as viewers, bounded by the bank and cliff to
our left, and set off balance by the shoreline falling off to our right, feel
ourselves swept into the infinities of sea, horizon and sky. Arkona, the
northernmost point on Rügen, is seen here from the very shore by which
Kosegarten built his chapel (illus. ). We know too that in  Friedrich
produced a series of views of Rügen, one of which was meant to ‘illus-
trate’ Kosegarten’s shore-sermon from the third eclogue of Jucunde.
Although empty of pastor and congregation, the transcendent structure
of the Arkona sepia accords with the tenor of Kosegarten’s sermon.
Although Friedrich would already have known Kosegarten’s poetry
during his early training in Greifswald, his attempt to create, as it were, a
visual analogy to the shore-sermon emerged only later, after the artist had


   

 View of Arkona with Rising Moon, –. Albertina, Vienna.

settled in Dresden in . Friedrich first had to discover what it could

possibly mean pictorially to render landscape at once wholly natural and
wholly infused by divinity, at once devoid of the instruments and legends
of faith and yet functional as devotional image. On its own Kosegarten’s
sacramental reading of nature offers no brief for landscape painting, nor
can it explain Friedrich’s project. The rhetoric of the shore-sermon, like
much eighteenth-century nature poetry, and indeed like the paysage
moralisé of the Renaissance, constructs a system of analogies between the
mind and nature, God and His creation, and the Book of Scripture and
the Book of the World, analogies which are then explicated theologically
in the course of the poem-sermon. Subsumed under this rhetoric,
Friedrich’s landscapes might appear as themselves analagous to, and
therefore readable as, a shore-sermon. However, as Ramdohr observed
already when rejecting the religious pretentions of Cross in the Mountains,
painting is not nature, nor can it mediate, as written texts can, a framing
‘allegory’. Friedrich’s later interpreters may, and usually do, introduce an
allegory into Friedrich’s landscapes by setting them against contemporary
texts – Kosegarten, the poets and philosophers of Romanticism, even the
written comments of the artist himself. Yet this impulse contradicts our
immediate experience of Friedrich’s landscapes, which always station us


 

on the way to, but never having yet arrived at, the altar, the divine, or
meaning; neither does it accord with the Romantics’ expressed belief in
the tautegorical character of their productions – that is, the idea that art,
like myth, is the best possible formulation for an unknown thing which
cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented. Kosegarten can
be of help in our understanding of Friedrich, however. When the aspir-
ing artist encountered the young Romantics in Dresden, he was prepared
for their ideas through his contact in Greifswald both with a religious
Pietism, and with the aesthetic sensibilities of Storm and Stress.
Moreover, in understanding his impulse to ‘illustrate’ the shore-sermon
of Kosegarten (as he seems to have done explicitly in ), we will
observe the evolution of a new mode of pictorial analogism, in which the
poem’s system of symbolic association finds echo in a comparable system
specific to painting and to the experience of painting.
After studying under Quistorp in Greifswald for four years, Friedrich
enrolled at the age of twenty in the Copenhagen Academy of Art in .
This decision to do his formal training in Denmark rather than in one of
the two great academies of central Europe at the time, Dresden and Vienna,
was probably taken on the recommendation of Quistorp. But it may also
reflect the young artist’s own ambitions and sensibilities. Copenhagen was
the centre of the so-called ‘Renaissance of the North’, that late eigh-
teenth-century revival of the ancient Germanic and Nordic past. Strongly
influenced by England’s Gothic Revival, and anticipating Romanticism’s
rediscovery of the Middle Ages, the Scandinavian renaissance encompassed
diverse phenomena: the philological recovery of ancient Norse myths, lan-
guages and literatures; the shift in archaeological interest from the monu-
ments of Classical antiquity to the remnants of native past cultures, such as
rune-stones, pagan graves and cultic sites; a taste for the unclassical drama
of Shakespeare, and the cloudy, pseudo-Gaelic poetry of Ossian; a fashion-
ing of a new mythology, combining the reconstructed national legends
with the Protestant faith supposedly best preserved in Scandinavia; and the
new aesthetic appreciation for northern landscape and nature. Kosegarten
was this renaissance’s most popular German poet, and Nicolai Abraham
Abildgaard (–), painter and instructor at the Copenhagen
academy, was its most important artist and aesthetic theorist, which sug-
gests that Friedrich’s move from Greifswald to Copenhagen may have been
partly informed by this shared sensibility.
In Copenhagen, Friedrich embarked on a course of instruction mod-
elled on the traditional curriculum of the Académie Royale de Peinture in


   

 Nude Youth, .

Library of the Art
Academy, Copenhagen.

Paris. Students worked their way through a fixed sequence of classes

beginning with copying from prints, progressing to sketching from plaster
casts and finally, and only by the end of the programme, to drawing from
live models. Informing this regimen was the doctrine, implied by the
Renaissance humanistic theory of painting and elaborated in the writings
and institutions of the French Academy, of the supremacy of history
painting over the genres of, in descending order, portraiture, animal paint-
ing, landscape and still life. Philipp Otto Runge, who attended the
Copenhagen Academy between  and , and who was to reject his-
tory painting’s traditional primacy, wrote of his ‘eternal attack of yawning’
elicited by the Academy’s rigid course of study, and compared his training
to the new, innovative Paris curriculum under Jacques-Louis David, where
students mostly studied live models. We possess no writings by Friedrich
documenting his Copenhagen experience. His surviving work from the
period, however, does not suggest that he was an inspired or inspiring pupil
(illus. ). From a series of watercolours from  illustrating Friedrich
Schiller’s history play Die Räuber, however, we can at least discern that the
artist’s early ambitions included grand peinture (illus.  and ).


 Scene from
Schiller’s ‘Die Rauber’
Act V, scene ), 
June . National
Gallery, Berlin.

 Scene from
Schiller’s ‘Die Rauber’
(Act V, scene ), 
June . National
Gallery, Berlin.


   

Although in theory a mere ‘recreational accessory’ to history painting,

landscape painting was in practice an important part of the art of a num-
ber of instructors at the Copenhagen Academy. For example, Nicolai
Abildgaard, although known primarily for his figural compositions in the
manner of Michelangelo, produced numerous view-paintings or ‘veduta’.
And students at the Academy could be trained in landscape by Erik
Pauelsen, Christian August Lorentzen and Jens Juel. Juel (–),
who was the premier portraitist in Denmark at the time, was also the
Academy’s most talented and original landscape painter, and he seems to
have exerted the greatest influence on Friedrich. Juel’s landscape art
derives partly from the work of seventeenth-century Dutch painters like
Aert van der Neer, and partly from vedutas by Swiss masters like Johann
Ludwig Aberli. It is distinguished by its dramatic representation of light,
its interest in recognizably ‘Northern’ scenes, and its relative naturalism
which, unlike the more mannered and pathos-charged Sentimentalism of
Copenhagen’s other landscapists, discovers its vehicles of ‘feeling’ in the
real landscapes of Denmark.
In his canvas Northern Lights, for example, Juel bestows a gentle sub-
limity upon the rather mundane scene of a gate, some bushes and small
trees, and a wanderer resting at a thatched shelter by the road (illus. ).
Reducing ‘setting’ to a narrow strip of dark foreground, and halting our
visual progress into depth through the wall and closed gate that run par-
allel to the picture plane, the painter allows his landscape to function as
mere parapet for the canvas’s true subject, the aurora borealis of the north-
ern sky. Juel introduces here a number of devices that Friedrich later
exploits in his mature art, for example: the use of visual barriers (bushes,
wooden gate and stone wall) which, closing off our access to the distance,
makes the viewer feel at once captive in the foreground and dwarfed by
the infinity beyond; the radical reduction of midground and the attendant
obfuscation of foreground through darkness, which causes the landscape
to plunge suddenly from the near world of murky boundaries and mun-
dane particulars to a clarified, boundless and insubstantial distance; and
the juxtaposition of different kinds of night lights (here the glow of the
unrisen sun and the wanderer’s warming fire) which fragment visible real-
ity into so many disjunctive epiphanies. Most importantly, a work like
Juel’s Northern Lights would have demonstrated to Friedrich that the sub-
lime can be present in landscapes neither exotic nor Antique, that pathos
and sentiment can be expressed without histrionic plots of storms, ship-
wrecks, avalanches and erupting volcanoes, and that infinities, everywhere


 

 Jens Juel, Northern Lights. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

present, must be invoked subjectively, not as attributes of setting or event,

but as simply the transformation, through painting, of how we see.
In most of his Copenhagen works, Friedrich seems not yet to have
learned these lessons. His struggle remains still a simple one of training
his pen to the outline of things observed, and in this task he was a slow
learner. The example of Juel’s Northern Lights can be felt, however, in the
composition of a watercolour like Landscape with Pavilion, produced in
 and now in Hamburg (illus. ). Friedrich establishes the foreground
as a series of barriers arranged parallel to the picture plane: again the
closed wooden gate, again the thatched shelter open to the left, and, in
between, a pile of boulders outlined in jagged pen strokes. Yet where Juel
reveals an expanse of light and space behind such enclosures, centring his
composition on the gate and on the avenue of sight beyond, Friedrich
offers nothing but a foreground set off horizonless against a blank sky.
Our gaze encounters here no central view, but is instead dissipated among
the objects near at hand. The gate, displaced to the picture’s edge, closes
off a bridge and blind road into trees, while to the right the interim
between the shelter and the boulders, suggesting perhaps a grassy lane,
offers no place of penetration for our gaze.


   

Once stationed resolutely here, we can discern a principle of order in

the scene. At the centre of the landscape, rising above the boulders and
shrub beyond, a tall fence post topped with a round finial and wooden
spikes divides the foreground into equal halves. Flanking this subtle ver-
tical are objects paired in exactly measured symmetry: at the far right,
the three planks leaning on the shelter, and at the far left, the three first
vertical stakes of the fence; a little inward at the right, the dark entrance
to the shelter, and at the left, the slanted post and finial of the foreground
gate; and, near the middle, the left edge of the pavilion and a tree just to
the left of the central post. Such subtle symmetries accord with the gen-
eral principle of bifurcation in the landscape, not only in the play
between grassy lane and closed bridge, but also in the opposition of bare
to leafy trees, and of the thatched hovel to stately pavilion. It is easy to read
these pairings symbolically, as constitutive of a paysage moralisé, in which
the viewer stands halted at the crossroads between, say, death and life, pov-
erty and riches, evil and good. One recent commentator has suggested
that the pavilion, the place of stability in the composition and the object
of our yearning, represents Paradise closed off from us by gate and
bridge (i.e., death and passage to the beyond), while the thatched hut
represents the impoverishment of our earthly existence. At one level,
Friedrich’s watercolour is simply topographical, depicting an actual
belvedere near Klampenberg, north of Copenhagen. Such descriptive
specificity, combined with the artist’s careful integration of pictorial
structure (like the central pole and flanking symmetries) into what seems
at first sight to be a disturbingly random natural scene, suggests that
Friedrich aspires to make meaning appear not as the artist’s constructed
invention, but as the outcome of the individual viewer’s own ordering and
interpretative labour.
This subtle subjectification of landscape painting’s semantic value, this
sense that significance resides in the way we see things, rather than what
things in themselves might possibly be or mean, is demonstrated power-
fully in one aspect of Friedrich’s Landscape with Pavilion overlooked in
the literature. The belvedere, with its windowed upper storey and
balustraded rooftop, suggests the possibility of overview (hence bel vedere),
and stands opposed to the watercolour’s low and limited perspective on
its scene. Instead of offering our gaze a sublime vista of the horizon,
Friedrich gives us rather the glimpse of an elevated place where such a
gaze might unfold. In Landscape with Pavilion, the sublimity that would be
visible from there is only evoked obliquely, through the way the landscape


 

drops off just beyond the pavilion (which is why the treetops there are
level with our gaze), and the light which illuminates the pavilion’s far side.
This gesture of stationing the viewer outside, or just behind, a more priv-
ileged place of viewing is characteristic of Friedrich’s mature art, and it is
embodied in such ubiquitous devices as the Rückenfigur, the closed gate
and the partialized view through a window. In the early Landscape with
Pavilion, which stands close to Juel and to the moralizing landscape of the
eighteenth century, we can already observe the effect that surrogates for
an open panorama have on the way we read the picture’s very ‘subject’.
The juxtaposition of the pavilion’s lit right exterior to the thatched
hut’s darkened interior might be allegorized as, say, the Pearly Gates and
Hellmouth, or even the infinite and finite. Yet from our place of exile out-
side the panoptic belvedere, we are made to feel ourselves as precisely not
as the centralized focus of an allegory, not as a homo viator in bivio com-
manding the choice between the way of life and the way of death. Already
here, at  and in however timid a graphic style, Friedrich has begun to
redefine the subject of landscape. Neither representing this or that locale,
nor this or that moralizing allegory, his landscapes aspire to reflect in their
pictorial and semantic structures the contradictions and constitutions of
subjectivity per se.
To clarify the nature of this redefinition, I shall consider three pictures
produced by Friedrich in the decade leading up to the Cross in the
Mountains. In each, nature is treated elegiacally, as expression of evidences
of past life, yet each represents differently the character of nature’s expres-
sivity. Together they outline a path, characteristic of the trajectory of
Friedrich’s historical achievement, from the locodescriptive and moraliz-
ing veduta of late eighteenth-century Sentimentalism, through a peculiar
form of history painting, to a kind of art which will come to be called
Romantic landscape.
The watercolour of Emilias Kilde, dated  May , represents a
famous well in Sølyst, near Copenhagen, built to commemorate the death
of Count Ernst Schimmelmann’s first wife Emilia, née Countess von
Rantzau (illus. ). The well itself was designed in  by Abildgaard, and
had already been portrayed by Juel in an oil of . Friedrich’s  water-
colour, which is one of a number of early landscapes depicting fountains
and springs from parks around Copenhagen, thus takes up a motif already
saturated with significance for the artist’s academic milieu. It is hard to say
what ‘meanings’ Friedrich himself has bestowed upon his veduta that are
not already present in the real fountain in Sølyst. For in the elegiac act of


   

 Emilias Kilde: Monument in Park near Copenhagen,  May .

Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

dedicating a well to the deceased Emilia, landscape itself, here the natural
spring, has been endowed with human significance and harnessed into an
allegory of life and death. The terms of this allegory are given in the text
inscribed on the well, which Friedrich transcribes in the original Danish on
the verso of his sheet, and indicates graphically within the watercolour
through some scribbles on the well’s bright front face. Addressed to the
deceased, the inscription designates the landscape as a place frequented by


 

Emilia, consecrates this spot as ‘holy’ (‘Helligt er det sted’), and stages there
a scene of mourning, in which the name Emilia fills the beholder’s heart
with ‘innocence, Heaven’s innocence’ and ‘tears’. The image of saturation
and overflow is appropriate to the place. For the spring water that pours
forth from the well evokes, on the one hand, the state of innocence, in the
metaphor of origin or source, and, on the other hand, the work of mourn-
ing, the waters metaphorized as tears, which transform the well into an
eternal larmoyant within the landscape. This kind of text has ancient roots
in the wayside inscription used to guide strangers to a watering place. As
Geoffrey Hartman has shown, already in the votive epigrams of Theocritus
and the Greek Anthology such nature inscriptions engendered a poetry
combining elegy and description, in which the reader, addressed as a trav-
eller, is exhorted to rest and perhaps to hear the voice of the living com-
memorating the dead. When Friedrich comes to represent Emilia’s well
‘from nature’, as he writes on the verso, he does so not as original mourner,
but as one who has obeyed the siste viator of a poetic inscription in nature.
Or more precisely: his own commemoration, which depicts the monument
from the side, at an oblique angle, gives the viewer the impression of having
been halted in passage neither by the memory of Emilia, nor even by the
inscription’s exhortation, but by the beauty and feeling expressed in the
veduta itself. Yet in the way the cubic monument determines the scene’s
organization of space, and in his summary treatment of the surrounding
trees and foliage, Friedrich still depends on the fountain, its inscription and
its sad history to fill the landscape with feeling.
In a watercolour dated  May , Scene of Mourning, Friedrich
attempts to construct on his own a story of loss and mourning (illus. ).
A woman sits with two boys in a bleak landscape by the sea. The woman’s
pose, the way she props her head in her hand, suggests the traditional atti-
tude of melancholy or inner distress, a motif which Friedrich developed
in a woodcut of c.  (illus. ), as do the sprawled or slumping bodies
of her two companions. Beyond and to the right of these figures, a grave-
stone marked with a cross explains the cause of their sorrow and establish-
es for the scene its elegiac character. The woman, presumably a mother
surrounded by her sons, grieves for a loved one lost at sea; the duration of
her sorrow is measured by the ivy that covers the tomb. Another sheet
produced by Friedrich ten days earlier ( May ) reads as a pendant
to this scene of mourning (illus. ). A youth, turned from us to lost profile,
bids farewell to his companions, while to the left his sailing boat stands
rigged for departure. Against this scene, the sheet of  May represents


   

 Seated Woman on a
Rock,  August .
Kunsthalle, Mannheim.

either the tragic aftermath of the youth’s adventure, or else simply an

alternative or universalizing version of leave-taking as death. In any case,
the relation between the two watercolours elicits from us connective nar-
ratives, as does, on its own, the relation between the figures and the grave
in Scene of Mourning. In Emilias Kilde, it was the monument and its real
site in Sølyst that elegized the dead, investing Friedrich’s landscape with
feeling, and writing for it a plot of life and death, as well as rebirth through
nature and memory. In Scene of Mourning, Friedrich extricates his land-
scape from this dependency on site and prior inscription. In place of
Abildgaard’s fountain for tears, Friedrich fashions along with the mon-
ument a group of tearful mourners, who in their posture and legible
surrounds constitute the text of elegy.
This emphasis on narrative, as opposed to topography, is implied in
the sheet’s own inscription at the upper left, which reads, ‘den  Mei:
invent:.’ Abbreviating the Latin inventio or invenit, the term ‘invent:’
occurs in only three other inscriptions in the artist’s oeuvre: at the upper
left of the  May pendant sheet (illus. ), and above Friedrich’s two


 Woman with Spider’s
Web between Bare Trees,
c.  (woodcut by
Christian Friedrich).
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

 Scene of Mourning on
the Shore,  May .
Kunsthalle, Mannheim.


   

 Scene of Leave-taking,  May . Kunsthalle, Mannheim.

early compositions after Schiller’s Räuber (illus.  and ). Replacing

phrases like ‘sketched after nature’, such as appeared on the verso of
Emilias Kilde, the term denotes a kind of pictorial making traditionally
associated with history painting. For in academic discourse since the
Renaissance, invention, signifying both the general planning of composi-
tion and the choice and interpretation of subject matter, was regarded as
the specific strength and province of the history painter. The particular
history represented need not be, and indeed, from the standpoint of
academic classicism, should not be, itself newly invented by the painter,
but can be any fable, sacred or profane, ancient or modern, that Scripture,
history or poetry might provide. It is unclear, and perhaps finally unimpor-
tant, whether the pendant scenes of Leave-taking and Mourning illustrate a
story already known to their audience, as is the case in the slightly later
Schiller drawings. What Friedrich’s inscription does proclaim, however, is
that these sheets express death and mourning narratively, as a story legible
within a histrionic figural group.
Within this narrative, landscape functions simply as the domain of
analogy, in which the inner sentiments of the human subjects are pictured
through appropriately evocative elements in nature. This is the function,


 

for example, of the decidedly anthropomorphic tree in Scene of Mourning.

Its left contour responding to the profile of the figural group at its base,
its two main branches stretching into the sky like arms raised in a gesture
of wild lament, the ruined tree articulates a pathos that the scene’s human
figures, in their passive, introverted poses, cannot themselves express.
Landscape and its inhabitants, which is to say nature and consciousness,
are presented in a state of reciprocity or sympathy: the three birds in
flight at the left, corresponding to the three mourners, visualize in their
seaward journey the desire of the living to join with the dead; the dog
howling as it gazes off towards the setting sun voices a natural dirge for
the deceased; and the rocks to the lower left, rhyming visually with the
body of the youth lying at the right, not only become themselves poten-
tially animate through this correspondence, but also integrate the human
figure into the landscape, perhaps in a manner anticipating death.
What, though, does this affinity between desolate nature and a fable of
human tragedy achieve for our own sympathy, our own emotional reci-
procity with either the desolate landscape or the ruined family? In Scene
of Leave-taking, Friedrich’s ‘invention’, which in essence is that system of
formal and symbolic correspondences between human figure and natural
setting, compromises the work’s effect both as landscape and as history
painting. For on the one hand, the mother and her two sons are so incor-
porated into the natural world that they appear less as actors in a solemn
human event than as mere spirits of the place, staffage figures whose fable
serves only to explicate a moral sentiment analogizable to any dreary
seascape. On the other hand, the landscape they people is so blatantly
anthropomorphic, so overdetermined by human meaning and plot, that it
scarcely qualifies as nature at all. While its withered tree and visibly trod-
den soil are more random and therefore specific in their contours than are,
say, the rather formulaic foliage and terrain of Emilias Kilde, the landscape
of Scene of Mourning appears far more staged and artificial than any of
Friedrich’s Copenhagen vedutas. This is partly because a work like
Emilias Kilde, through its compositional device of depicting the fountain
from the side rather than head on, implies the presence and particularity
of the viewer. Even though the evocation of feeling depends here largely
on the existence of a prior history and elegiac inscription not legible with-
in the landscape as such, the siste viator of inscription is already implied
by the structure of the image, which insists that the veduta we see is some-
thing already subjectively viewed: a landscape beheld by a halted traveller.
In Scene of Mourning, Friedrich peoples his landscape with subjects that


   

enact the feelings the artist would evoke in us, yet for all their gestures of
interiority, and for all their correspondences to the elements of landscape,
they neither elicit our inwardness, nor do they mediate for us our affinity
with the natural world. What Friedrich learnt in the next few years was
how to free his art both from its dependence on the conventional sites
of feeling (the graveyards, elegiac fountains and ruined abbeys of Senti-
mentalism), and from artificial, externalizing and ‘invented’ histories.
When in the s the artist proclaims that ‘a picture must not be invent-
ed, but rather felt’, he registers the achievement of his art as a movement
from history painting to Erlebniskunst, or more precisely, as the inter-
nalization of history and inscription into the experience of the viewing
subject.
Friedrich’s Fog, executed in oil on canvas in  and kept now in
Vienna, is representative of this achievement (illus. ). It stands at the
very beginning of the artist’s work in oil, for, with the exception of a few
minor canvases dating from  to , Friedrich’s ‘finished’ paintings
before  are all executed in watercolour, gouache and sepia. Ostensibly,
Fog represents a vision of departure, of boats embarking from a shore,
and it therefore belongs within the general thematic orbit of the pendant
watercolours of Leave-taking and Mourning. Friedrich, however, has radi-
cally altered what it is that can be said to depart in his landscape, as well
as how, in the first place, the picture constitutes for us its vision.
Friedrich stations us at the ocean’s edge, before a scene of departing
boats which have all but disappeared into fog. There are remnants
enough, though, to write plots for the picture. The nearer boat, a tender,
is rowed from the shore carrying passengers to the square-rigged ship
anchored out at sea. In the foreground, in that narrow strip of rocks and
dead grass which is the site of embarkation and which constitutes the only
area of the scene not veiled by fog, we are left with an anchor and its sev-
ered towline, and, to the right, two Y-shaped sticks – presumably poles for
hanging fishing nets to dry, such as we see on the shore in Friedrich’s
Morning of – (illus. ). At one level, commentators are right in
discerning in these two sticks the suggestion of crutches, and in the
beached anchor the traditional emblem of Hope. Given so little within
this canvas, we viewers tend to make the most of what we have, and so we
postulate that someone has embarked from this shore and left behind his
props, in a manner analogous to the wanderer in Winter Landscape with
Church (illus. ). Such a reading engenders further speculation: the shore
might represent the place of death, and the departing tender, like Charon’s


 

bark, might ferry the soul beyond this world to a transcendent realm
whose promise of eternal life is signalled in the foreground anchor. The
spiritual tenor of Kosegarten’s shore-sermons unfolds throughout the
represented scene.
At another level, however, the sticks in Friedrich are in fact not dis-
carded props, but the instruments of everyday labour isolated so as to seem
as though they were crutches; and the anchor, sometimes just an anchor,
rises before a wholly natural scene such as could be observed from any
shore along the Baltic at dawn. This uncertain coexistence between nature
and emblem, between ordinary landscape meticulously portrayed and
whatever figurative meaning might be felt to lie ‘behind’ it, is Friedrich’s
most important and difficult semantic achievement as a painter. In terms
of Friedrich’s crucial phase of development between  and , it
enables narrative, like the plots illustrated in the pendant watercolours of
, as well as elegiac inscription, like the poem recorded on the verso of
Emilias Kilde, to appear as the personal and always only speculative inven-
tion of the individual viewing subject. If in Fog we seem to visit landscape
as mourners, our intimation of death has been elicited neither by senti-
mental monument and epitaph, nor by tragic history, but by something
inherent in the structure of the pictorial image itself which causes us to
read the seascape as if it were a grave.
In Fog, Friedrich constructs the scene of departure on a radical caesura
within pictorial space, between a barren foreground and an unfathomable
distance beyond. The strip of beach, rendered in focused detail and con-
trasting therefore with the blurring of sea and sky beyond, serves to situate
us within the represented space. Yet in the way it passes out of the picture
at both sides, refusing to frame or to stabilize our view out to sea, and
in the way it establishes neither material nor structural continuities with
what lies beyond, this beach also leaves us, as it were, stranded in the fore-
ground. Nor do the boats at sea offer orientation. Ostensibly floating on
the water’s waveless, textureless surface, they are so obscured by fog that
they appear not as objects occupying the scene’s midground, but as mono-
chrome silhouettes placed flat on a uniform ground that would be co-
extensive with the picture plane. Or rather, they hover in a limitless void
of mingled sea and sky whose boundary lies at our very feet, in that edge,
that narrow parapet, which is itself dissolving eerily into boulders half
submerged by sea.
Reproductions of Friedrich’s Fog lessen the canvas’s obscurity. They tend
to magnify the tonal contrasts between the ships and their greyish-blue


   

ground, and between the still sea and the dull sky. Before the painting itself,
the viewer must work hard to discern the square-rigged ship and its ten-
der in the fog. And, once spotted, they can again be lost, so that they retain
always their potential status as mirages. This is partly due to the glassy
surface that Friedrich generally achieves in his oils. Building up his image
with multiple layers of glazes thinly applied, the artist not only erases all
evidence of brushwork and outline, but also produces an intensely reflec-
tive surface which, from certain angles and under particular lighting con-
ditions, conceals the painted image altogether. Making out the boats in
Fog involves, quite literally, discovering a point of view within our world
where the picture’s surface is free of shine. In this tiny canvas (. x 
cm), with its deliberately hazy subject, we find the silhouettes of the
ships best when we view the work from close up, so that the shadow of our
bodies, cast over the picture’s surface, picks out the represented world.
Friedrich was a master of all transitions between the visible and the invis-
ible, whether they occur within a represented landscape (e.g. fog in the
mountains, fire in the night, the rising and setting sun and moon, visions
through half-opened doors, distanced windows and obscuring gates and
fences), or are the consequence of an image’s actual viewing situation. In
Fog, he effects before his canvas, and through strictly pictorial means, a drama
of appearance and disappearance appropriate to the motif of departure
represented within his canvas. The reflective surface before us itself acting
as a barrier to our gaze, we mimic in our bodily movements the gestures,
of one who, left behind on a foggy shore, struggles to glimpse perhaps the
embarkation of a loved one.
Friedrich allows loss, absence, the departure of things close to us, all to
occur within our immediate experience of the image: as the fog that ren-
ders nature fugitive, and as the oil painting itself that flickers between a
detailed description of a coastal scene in fog and a blank surface reflecting
light. More powerfully than Emilias Kilde, which suggested in its oblique
prospect the presence of the halted traveller as surrogate viewer, or even
than Landscape with Pavilion, which thematized vision itself through its
panoptic belvedere, Fog implies within the represented scene the subjec-
tive process of perception and interpretation. And therefore, rather than
regarding the landscape’s haze or the picture’s compositional disjunctions
as, respectively, natural or artificial analogies to the human history of
departure or death, it may be more appropriate to regard the painting’s
ostensible subject-matter – ships departing from the shore, the soul’s
journey to eternal life, etc. – as so many narratives explicating the picture’s


 

more basic plot, which is the difficult relation between subject and object,
ourselves and the Vienna canvas. This reorientation helps clarify the ques-
tion of whether the foreground poles signify crutches or the anchor hope,
or indeed whether nature really means more than meets the eye. In an art
that seeks to erase the difference between experience and the representa-
tion of experience, our own allegorization of landscape will not recuper-
ate a hidden core of meaning constructed by the artist, as when we discern
in the ivy-covered tomb in Scene of Mourning an emblem of the promise
of a resurrection. It will simply return us to the scene’s imagined orginary
moment. For within the fiction of Erlebniskunst, what halted the artist
traveller on the foggy shore in the first place, and what still commands
our attention in the afterimage of that experience, is both an uncertain
intimation of death through the absence or loss of vision, and a desire to
find in nature the vehicles, signs and images of transcendence, and pene-
trate thereby into the fog, into another life, into the reflective surface of
the canvas.

It is extremely difficult to account historically for this transformation in

how landscape means. The increased specificity of a picture like Fog over
against such works as Emilias Kilde and the watercolours of ; its clos-
er, more particularizing description of the natural world, combined with
what might be called its heightened inwardness, its sense that the feelings
elicited by the landscape, as well as the way these feelings are elicited,
emerge from regions of subjectivity deeper than the melancholy moods of
Friedrich’s earliest works – these all are aesthetic developments common
to much of the art and literature of the period. It is possible, for example,
to describe these developments according to the traditional historiograph-
ical scheme, whereby the eighteenth-century Age of Sensibility or Storm
and Stress movement gives way around  to the culture of High
Romanticism. Friedrich’s early development would thus trace a path
similar to that which leads, say, from Kosegarten to Novalis, or from a
descriptive poet like William Lisle Bowles to Coleridge or Wordsworth.
While sharing with their sentimental predecessors an emphasis on land-
scape and feeling, the Romantics distinguish themselves by their unique
fusion of nature and consciousness, a fusion which occurs not only with-
in the landscapes they represent (as when the poet’s perceiving mind
seems to merge with the scene perceived), but as well, and more radically,
in the way these landscapes address their readers or viewers. The affinity
between Friedrich and Romanticism was registered even by the earliest


   

critics of Cross in the Mountains, and it will continue to inform historical

accounts of his development. But the question remains: where does this
affinity get us in our understanding of his landscapes?
When Friedrich finished his studies at the Copenhagen Academy in ,
he travelled via Berlin to Dresden, capital of Saxony, where he remained
until his death on  May . According to his curriculum vitae, he chose
to settle here ‘in order to continue his artistic efforts in close proximity to
exquisite art treasures, and surrounded by a beautiful landscape’, in a city
in which ‘learning and the arts are blossoming, and which is rightly called
the German Florence’. Dresden and its environs, lying in the basin of the
Elbe River, were renowned for their natural beauty, and the Dresden Acad-
emy of Art, founded in , was particularly strong in the area of land-
scape painting. Students at the Academy were granted daily access to the
great Gemäldegalerie in the city and were permitted to study the print and
drawing collection up to twice a week. Immediately on arriving in Dresden,
Friedrich enrolled in the Academy, partly as a means of connecting him-
self to a local network of artists, critics, patrons and employers, and partly
in order to enjoy the registered student’s visiting privileges to the Gemälde-
galerie and its ‘treasures’. He thus became part of the city’s veritable army
of students who, as one contemporary observer put it, ‘hasten[ed] from
house to house all day . . . ek[ing] out a miserable existence’. In ,
one-fifth of Dresden’s population were theological candidates, usually em-
ployed as private tutors. In his early years in Dresden Friedrich seems to
have made his living variously by instructing privately the children of
wealthy families in drawing, guiding tours of the region and hand-
colouring landscape prints for sale by local art dealers.
As Henri Brunswig has argued in his account of the social circumstances
of Romanticism, it was from precisely the surplus of over-educated,
highly ambitious, under-employed and deeply frustrated middle-class
young men that the Romantic movement drew its members:

The students thronging the universities are well aware of the

difficulties ahead of them. This makes them more eager to attract
attention to themselves. To become famous is a short cut to the
heights of a career in politics or the civil service.

Of all the Germanies, Saxony had the greatest number of authors. The little
city of Göttingen alone, with its , souls, boasted  officially recognized
writers. Together with its university and the local artistic patronage of the


 

Duke of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg, a rich literary milieu helped make Dres-

den one of the centres of the Romantic movement. The Schlegels (August
Wilhelm and Friedrich, as well as Wilhelm, Karoline and Charlotte Ernst),
Novalis, Tieck, Heinrich Steffens, the philosopher Gotthilf Heinrich von
Schubert, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Adam Müller, and later Kleist all
frequented or lived in Dresden during the first years of the century.
It is unnecessary to detail here the various personal connections and
allegiances between Friedrich and the writers of Romanticism. Nor is it
possible, or even appropriate to map how specific literary or philosophical
texts become, so to speak, visualized in his art. Romanticism’s projective
character, as always only a ‘fragment of the future’, resists functioning as
historical explanation for any given work of art. Herein lies the challenge
of Friedrich’s landscapes to art history today. Friedrich worked within a
culture whose explicit theoretization of art far exceeded in subtlety and
wilful complexity virtually all current art historical discourses, indeed
whose penchant for theory per se both engenders and surpasses our own
present ‘age of criticism’. Given an epoch when philosophy was believed
to fulfil itself in the work of art, when art was deemed, as Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have put it, ‘the speculative
organon par excellence’, there can be no clear separation between theory
and history in our own analysis of that epoch’s cultural productions. It
is, for example, a historical fact that Friedrich, lauded in  as the
‘Metaphysikus with the brush’, paraphrases in his writings the aesthetics
of Schelling and refers to ‘Hegel’s philosophy’. Yet to recuperate the
meaning of such relations between the artist and his intellectual context,
or more difficult, between painting and theory, one will oneself have to be
a Metaphysikus of historical discourse, prepared to excavate the originary
historical ground of one’s own interpretive edifice. At the very least, to
interpret Friedrich thus would mean reaching towards a level of theor-
etization about art and history commensurate to that of his age.
It is hard to say whether the specific achievement of Friedrich’s 
Fog is predicated upon his encounter with Romanticism. The fugitive
landscape does effect within us a certain mode of self-reflection, a certain
apprehension of the contingency of object and meaning upon the view-
ing subject, which accords well with the general project of speculative
Idealism. In addition to his encounter with Romanticism through the
literary circles of Dresden, Friedrich would have already encountered a
pictorial application of a Romantic aesthetic to landscape painting in
the precocious art of Philipp Otto Runge, whom Friedrich first met in


   

Greifswald in . Yet if Friedrich’s art is genuinely philosophical, as

clearly the Romantics themselves believed, then it is so precisely through
the irreducible specificity of the art object itself, which is to say: through
its visual, rather than verbal or discursive, construction. It is this which
we shall have to clarify before turning to the way pictorial form deter-
mines the ‘meaning’ of Friedrich’s landscapes.

The contemporary discourses of history and criticism are becoming as

ill-disposed to the distinguishing between form and content in the analy-
sis of a work of art as they are, say, to disputing whether our soul survives
the death of our body. Founded on the notion of the image as always the
irreducible relation between signifier and signified, and more generally on
the total embeddedness of thought in language and representation, most
modern semiotics, whether implicit or explicit, can imagine neither pure
content, unsupported by the materiality of a signifer, nor pure form, i.e., the
non-reference of a sign totally cleansed of its commerce with the symbolic
order. When the latter is claimed, as in certain unreflective formalisms, or
in the once avant-garde notion of ‘pure painting’, one tends today to discern
an ideology motivating such attempts, and the very practice of sanitizing
the sign becomes once again invested with political or social ‘content’. In
the framed nothingness of From the Dresden Heath, or in the passage into
loss plotted by Fog, Romantic landscape seems to prefigure the blinding and
blinded project of twentieth-century abstraction, which is why Friedrich can
figure as the origin of such histories as, for example, Robert Rosenblum’s
controversial Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. If we
submit Friedrich’s art to the semiotics of Romanticism, however, we discern
a far more complex state of affairs. Abstraction will always be only a passing
moment in our experience of the image, just as Friedrich himself is often
compelled to raise a cathedral above the last horizon of his spiritual ‘histor-
ies’, as modernity’s return of the repressed. Yet neither does this return
fully eradicate the moment of blankness. The inextricability of content from
form, assumed as axiomatic to criticism today, is itself but one moment
within a larger allegory. Unravelling this allegory, which will involve read-
ing Friedrich’s landscapes against Romanticism’s semiotic master-term, the
symbol, will reveal the historical emergence, and therefore contingency, of
what we today call the sign.


 6
Friedrich’s System

Is it even provisionally possible to generalize about Friedrich’s formal

innovation in landscape? Can we speak of some structuring principle, some
compositional logic, that informs all his landscapes, regardless of subject,
such that they each bear the mark of his authorship? The Freiherr von
Ramdohr seems to think so in his review of Cross in the Mountains. ‘My
criticism’, Ramdohr assures us at the outset of his argument, ‘is not direct-
ed against Mr Friedrich’s painting, but against the system that is conspic-
uous in it.’ By ‘system’ Ramdohr means something like a fully developed
method of landscape composition, exemplified in Cross in the Mountains,
but also repeatable in the execution of other future pictures. At one level,
by imputing a system to Friedrich’s art, Ramdohr simply reflects his own
Neo-classical aesthetic, which, as we have seen, evaluates and dictates artis-
tic productions according to a set of fixed rules whose efficacy and closure
are ultimately guaranteed by that cultural totality par excellence, the exam-
ple of Antiquity. Thus before analysing Friedrich’s system, Ramdohr sets
forth what is proper to landscape painting, circumscribing its specific
domain and ideal by placing it within academic criticism’s own controlling
system: the hierarchy of the genres.
Figure painting, Ramdohr tells us, takes as its subject the human body,
and must fashion its images according to principles commensurate with
that task. Its essential dimension should be, like the body itself, the verti-
cal. All painterly means (composition, light, colour, etc.) must function to
valorize, which is to say, to isolate and distinguish, the upright figure over
against its ground, hence, in history painting, the subordination of all
parts to the singular action of the great individual, and hence too the pref-
erence for local colour and for the clarifying effect of light as a medium
for modelling the figure in space. Landscape painting, on the other hand,
does not depict the singular man, but rather the manifold of nature. Its
essential dimension is the horizontal, the ground plane as it recedes evenly
and coherently into depth. Rather than establishing boundaries around a
principal body, landscape’s task is to establish continuities between bodies,


   

to harness the manifold into a unified whole. In place of figure painting’s

unity of the body, landscape substitutes the constructed coherence of the
viewer’s visual field through the devices of linear perspective and of the
layering of space into foreground, midground and background. And in
place of local colour and light as mere isolating media, landscape repre-
sents colour always modified by atmosphere and distance, while light is
celebrated as a substance in itself, indeed as one of landscape painting’s
proper subjects.
In demonstrating how Cross in the Mountains systematically, as it were,
disobeys these canons, Ramdohr characterizes quite accurately some of
Friedrich’s formal innovations in the field of landscape painting. Instead
of constructing his picture as the ordered progression of a ground plane
into depth, the artist isolates a single vertical mass, detaching it from any
visible connection to a ‘ground’, and positioning it before us so that it at
once obscures our prospect of the horizon, and allows us no point of
access to its space. And because the mountain also covers the sun, the
landscape, such as it exists, is thrown into darkness and is therefore
stripped of those traditional strengths of the genre: aerial perspective and
the representation of light.
Ramdohr discerns that these innovations constitute an assault on the
hierarchy of the genres. The pictorial devices traditionally appropriate to
history painting and portraiture (verticality, isolation of objects, contrasts
of light and shadow, etc.) are transposed in Cross in the Mountains to the
representation of landscape. This would indeed accord with one of the
work’s basic intentions, which is to refigure the quintessential history
within Western art, Christ’s Passion, as a mundane albeit emotionally
charged scene of a carved cross in the midst of ordinary nature. For
Ramdohr, of course, who still believed that each pictorial genre possesses
its own separate essence, such an amalgam was inadmissible. Yet to the
Romantics it had already become an aesthetic ideal. Had not Runge in
 prophesied the sublimation of the fossilized tradition of history
painting into a new form of landscape? Against the academic doctrine of
the hierarchy of the genres, Romanticism proposed two radical alterna-
tives: either the work of art should synthesize all possible poetic types,
which is the ideal behind Romanticism’s exemplary genre, the novel or
Roman, or else each work, as the unique or eigentümlich expression of
genius, should inhabit its own category, which is exactly how Friedrich’s
supporters defended Cross in the Mountains against Ramdohr’s prescrip-
tive criticism. For as Friedrich Schlegel wrote around , ‘The modern


 ’ 

poetic types are either only one or infinite in number. Each poem a genre
in itself.’
We shall leave aside, for the moment, the presence of an ideological
subtext in such a position, how, for example, the erasure of hierarchy and
of absolute values in art, combined with the utopia of a union of equal cre-
ations, might reflect the political ideal of the modern bourgeois republic,
that is, the hope, nascent among advanced thinkers in Germany at ,
of a new, unified German nation constituted by equal citizens. What con-
cerns us here is neither the demise of the Neo-classical aesthetic, nor the
blurring of art and politics in Romanticism, but rather the simple validi-
ty of Ramdohr’s description of Cross in the Mountains, and in particular
his assertion that, for all its apparent disregard for rule and tradition,
Friedrich’s canvas itself proposes a system of representation. Romanticism,
even with its celebration of the radical Eigentümlichkeit of all individuals
and their productions, was not opposed to totalizing systems, although the
actual systems which the Romantics did draft (as, for example, the anony-
mous text of c.  transcribed by Hegel and entitled the ‘Earliest
System-Programme of German Idealism’) took the representative form
of the fragment. This paradox of the co-presence of the fragmentary and
the systematic is articulated by Schlegel in his Athenaeum Fragment : ‘It
is equally deadly for the spirit to have a system and to have none.
Therefore, it will have to decide to combine both.’ It is within this para-
dox that Friedrich’s system will come into focus.
Ramdohr does not reject Cross in the Mountains only by measuring it
against the standard of tradition. He also detects something wrong with
the scene itself: a fabric of errors which compromises the image’s aesthet-
ic value and undermines the systematic character of Friedrich’s system.
In Ramdohr’s account, the picture’s flaws arise from the ambiguity of the
landscape’s implied viewpoint. From our position vis-à-vis the foreground,
we as viewers feel ourselves stationed below the mountain’s summit, some-
where down its slope, so that we look upward at the cross. Yet Friedrich
renders the crucifix itself as if it were observed from across, from some
point in space high above the level of the foreground as it disappears
under the lower framing edge. At such an altitude, Ramdohr correctly
argues, the earth’s horizon would become visible beyond the summit,
indeed would be approximately level with the crucifix’s base. To this ambi-
guity of viewpoint are added discrepancies in Friedrich’s treatment of
light. Judging from the convergence of the sun’s rays at an imagined point
just above the canvas’s lower edge, we would indeed seem placed below


   

the crucifix, so that the mountain rises between us and the sun. Yet in that
case, as Ramdohr notes, primly quoting a French authority on the rules of
optics and perspective, we would neither see the sun’s rays, nor could the
gilt Christ appear as it does, reflecting light on its surface, for ‘the sun,
no matter how low it stands [on the horizon], can illuminate no object
from below’.
Of course, what Ramdohr here describes as error contributes to the
picture’s astonishing effect. Judged simply by our view of the foreground
trees, and by the mountain’s steep slope visible at either side of the can-
vas, we indeed hover above the ground as it would pass below the canvas’s
lower limit. And when we gaze upwards at the summit, we are lifted even
higher, so that our contemplation of the crucifix becomes a sublime ele-
vation, or upward fall, appropriate to an encounter with the sacred,
Friedrich achieves this effect by overturning the conventions of landscape
painting. The mountain’s shoulders, running diagonally along the picture
plane, suggest also the orthogonals of linear perspective which lead the
eye horizontally into depth. Yet instead of converging at a vanishing point
on the horizon, these lines construct the apex of a pyramid concealing
any horizon. Having reached their intersection with our gaze, we experi-
ence the dizzying discovery that we have travelled up rather than out, and
that what we thought would be the meeting of sky and earth is a radical
disappearance of ground: the horizon transformed into a nearby abyss.
And where conventional, Claudian landscape space is basically structured
as a concavity flanked at its sides by framing coulisses and receding from
us towards a centralized view of the distance, Cross in the Mountains pres-
ents us with a convexity that resists our gaze and is bordered on both sides
by a groundless view to the sky. With neither a firm ground on which to
stand, nor a stable horizon on which to fix our gaze, we thus encounter
Friedrich’s crucifix within an anxious state of visual disequilibrium.
Finally, the crucifix’s visible reflection of the sun from below may indeed
contradict the logic of earthly space and light, yet it also imagines a
mountain as high as the heavens, something which is suggested too by the
way the clouds seem to respond to the vertical of the cross. The carved
Christ establishes also through its shine a relation to the sun that, if not
natural, may therefore be symbolic in nature: an illumination whose very
illogic signals the presence of the divine, like the sun’s eclipse in the
Passion story.
That the viewer ‘cannot embrace a standpoint’ before the landscape
proves, for Ramdohr, that Friedrich’s system is rotten. Yet from another


 ’ 

perspective, that of an aesthetics of the sublime, this indeterminacy can

constitute the experience of transcendence. For Immanuel Kant as for his
Romantic heirs, sublimity in art occurs at the moment of representation’s
collapse, when the mind, seeking to comprehend its object, fails and
attains thereby an intuition of a transcendent order. According to this
model, our incapacity to find our place within Friedrich’s scene, which is
to say, our loss of a determinate relation between ourselves and represent-
ed nature through the artist’s deliberate disruption of the conventional
‘system’ of landscape, becomes a symbol of our relation to a transcendent
order. In Cross in the Mountains, the religious origins of this aesthetic proj-
ect are self-consciously preserved. The relation between man and God,
expressed traditionally by crucifix and the Passion history, is transposed
here to a relation between self and world, expressed now within the very
structure of represented nature. When lived experience as it occurs before
the painted canvas aspires to convey what had been mediated iconograph-
ically (i.e. literally through the depiction of the icon), then all clear dis-
tinctions between form and content, structure and meaning, become
unsustainable, and we enter into a mode of referentiality whose domain is
Erlebniskunst and whose Romantic terminus is the symbol.
Significantly, neither Ramdohr nor his Romantic opponents ever
themselves articulate how the structure of Cross in the Mountains might
relate to its specific subject. In order to attend to the historicity of land-
scape’s meaning, then, let us for the moment stay within the interpretative
bounds of the  controversy and consider some further aspects of
Friedrich’s system as form.
According to Ramdohr, the illogical viewpoint of Cross in the
Mountains has bad consequences for its treatment of visual detail. By hid-
ing the sun behind the mountain, Friedrich casts his scene in shadow, so
that instead of the atmospheric unity of traditional landscape, in which
the manifold of earth and sky are unified by an all-embracing envelope of
light, we see only a sharp contrast between a dark and therefore barely leg-
ible foreground, and a glowing and rather unnaturally coloured sky. Now
Cross in the Mountains, like Fog of , loses much of its complexity in
reproduction. A colour plate of the work tends either to accentuate the
visibility of objects represented in the foreground, by amplifying the
work’s tonal contrasts, or else it conceals the whole terrain in an impene-
trable darkness. Before the original canvas, the viewer has access to both
possibilities. At first the mountain indeed might appear as a dark silhou-
ette or undifferentiated blankness, additionally obscured by the usual


   

reflected glare on the canvas’s varnished surface. As our eyes grow accus-
tomed to shadow, however, and as we bear down on the work to dispel its
surface sheen, we discover within this seemingly massless area an aston-
ishing variety of objects – grasses, different types of fir, variegated rocks
and soil, etc. – equal to the diversity of nature. Our impression becomes
less one of a landscape observed and depicted already in shadow than of a
scene first depicted fully in light and then belatedly covered over by a layer
of dark glaze. We shall encounter this effect again in Friedrich’s scenes of
fog-covered mountains, where the extraordinary transitions achieved
between the solid forms of earth and the concealing mists and clouds
appear as if Friedrich has actually overpainted with grey a totally finished
landscape free of fog (e.g. illus. –).
Ramdohr’s deepest objection to the pictorial manner of Cross in the
Mountains stems from such ambiguities, such shifts between the visible and
the invisible, and between the part and the whole. On the one hand, Ram-
dohr argues, Friedrich fails to endow his scene with a coherent structure,
allowing us no single site of entrance into the landscape, and depicting the
summit as a flat silhouette observed from a great distance. On the other
hand, within the massless surface of the mountain, the artist also lavishes
attention on the minutest details of the scene, depicting ‘every twig, every
needle on the fir trees, every spot on the boulders’ as if it were observed
from close up. This finer optic, which Ramdohr attributes partly to
Friedrich’s fatal infatuation with the art of Dürer and his contemporaries,
further undermines the unity of the scene. Again, Ramdohr’s criticism has
great descriptive power. Beheld from a distance, Cross in the Mountains
seems indeed to position us outside the spaceless landscape, in a place always
both too high and too low. But observed from nearby, the canvas’s surface
appears decorated with an assemblage of objects, each so detailed that it
draws preternaturally close to us. Trapped within a play between proximity
and distance, familiarity and estrangement, presence and absence, the micro-
scopic and the colossal, we ourselves become discontinuous, able neither to
enter into the represented world, nor to observe it as a whole, from some
standpoint sub specie aeternitatis.
‘We are potential, chaotic organic beings’, wrote Schlegel in one of his
posthumous fragments. The human condition, here imagined as a purga-
torial state between a lost unity, mythicized as Eden and theorized by
Schiller and others as the ‘naive’, and an always future restoration of
unity, informs the Romantic conception of order and formal coherence in
art. Produced within this purgatory, the work of art must express both


 ’ 

 Dolmen by the Sea, –. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Weimar.

the chaos of its origins and the order which is its prophetic ‘potential’.
Elsewhere Schlegel notes that there are certain ancient discourses ‘from
which one could learn disorganization, or where confusion is properly
constructed and symmetrical’. Such ‘artful chaos’ (Kunstchaos) possesses
‘enough stability to outlast a Gothic cathedral’ (Athenaeum Fragment
). Friedrich’s landscapes aspire to this condition, and it is appropriate
that one of his most frequent motifs is that of the ruined Gothic church
as structure which at once orders and fragments pictorial space. As we
shall see, the carved crucifix within Cross in the Mountains, along with the
work’s gothicizing gilt frame, recollects this order, yet between these two
remnants of the cathedral lies the whole Kunstchaos of modern landscape.
Schlegel’s oxymoronic terms are useful in describing the painting’s curious
conjunction of incoherence and system which even the Neo-classical
Ramdohr could discern. For while Friedrich may disorganize conventional
landscape composition, he also constructs a new and in many ways stricter
system, one founded on the ancient order of symmetry.
It is a striking feature of Cross in the Mountains that tends to be over-
looked if we behold the canvas for too long: the summit rises symmetrical
at the very centre of the visual field. The diagonals of the mountain’s
slopes, angled at about °, pass out of the scene at corner points of the
canvas, so that the picture plane is dissected into roughly equal triangles.


   

 High Mountains, c. –. Destroyed ,

formerly in the National Gallery, Berlin.

That this rigid coincidence between the landscape’s structure and the
geometry of the canvas gets overlooked, indeed that it appears somehow
natural to the order of things, is partly due to its resemblance to yet anoth-
er system informing our reading of any image, namely the conventions of
linear perspective. As we observed, Friedrich constructs the principal
diagonals of the painting so that they appear like orthogonals, even if they
actually describe the sloping profile of the summit. The expectation, per-
sistent since the Renaissance, that parallel lines converge at a centralized
vanishing point, and that the picture itself is a plane intersecting the visual
pyramid at a right-angle, helps mask the aggressive symmetries of Cross in
the Mountains. That is, by superimposing his own system on to an older,
and by this time wholly naturalized system, Friedrich conceals the overtly
‘artful’ and constructed quality of his picture, reconciling the landscape’s
quasi-diagrammatic quality to its concomitant naturalism (i.e. its epochal
claim that what is represented as ‘altarpiece’ is not the Passion, but rather


 ’ 

a natural scene with carved cross experienced as Passion).

The symmetry of this landscape does not stop with the manner of its
enframement. In the foreground, two firs, although of differing heights,
rise above the lower framing edge at points precisely equidistant to the
canvas’s sides. Deeper into space and slightly off to the right, the two trees
immediately flanking the crucifix, along with the V-shaped summit rock,
together form another symmetrical grouping centred on the cross and
organizing too the reciprocity between the pyramid of the mountain and
the similarly shaped bands of clouds above. And in the background, the
sun’s rays establish further symmetries and describe triangles running
inversely to the pyramid of the mountain and to the bands of clouds.
Noting this succession of variously centred symmetries, Börsch-Supan
likens the resultant to and fro movement of the eye into depth to the
‘swing of a pendulum’. The simile of the pendulum implies the existence
of a fixed pivot point determining all movements and positions within the
landscape. Each of the various symmetries of Cross in the Mountains, how-
ever, order only a small segment of the image. The perfectly enframed
mountain, paired foreground firs, symmetrical summit group and geo-
metricized sun’s rays (themselves like positions of an inverted pendulum)
are discontinuous, parallactic systems, each with its own centre, scale,
implied viewpoint and logic. Against the achieved homogeneity of space
through linear perspective, against even the coherency of system implied
by the mechanism of a pendulum, Friedrich proposes fragmentary con-
structions of chaos, and therefore always only partialized constitutions of
the viewing subject as subject.
To understand such Kunstchaos, it is useful to consider its dominant
devices: symmetry and the succession of discontinuous systems. The rigid
symmetry of Friedrich’s pictures is without precedents in the history of
landscape. Philipp Otto Runge, it is true, had already fashioned radically
symmetrical images a few years before Cross in the Mountains, images
which he termed ‘landscapes’. In the small Morning of , for example,
certain minute natural details, notably the shiny bulbs and roots of the two
Amaryllis formosissimae at the lower corners of the picture’s figural frame,
are rendered with striking specificity, even if their overall shape, size and
orientation are determined by the paired relation of the picture’s two sym-
metrical sides (illus. ). Each bulb has uniquely coloured and configured
stem plates and outer skins, and each is displayed to us with differently
positioned highlights; we are thus given the impression not of Runge’s
faithful replication, in reverse, of a single plant or floral arabesque, but


   

 Philipp Otto Runge,

Amaryllis formosissima, .
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

rather of his depiction of two real and unique plants posed side by side
before a single light source and arranged so as to cohere to a symmetrical
pattern (illus. ). And in this seemingly perfect fit between nature’s par-
ticularity and artist’s system, or between the mimetic and the arabesque,
landscape offers no real resistance to the rage for order. The coastal view
that spreads to the horizon in the work’s central panel, while prefiguring
of certain aspects of Cross in the Mountains (e.g. the centralized and sym-
metrical overall composition, the paired plants at the lower framing edge,
the reciprocity of the landscape’s forms with the shape of the purple
clouds beyond and the arch-shaped visual field), excludes any random-
ness, any discontinuity of system which, while compromising symmetry,
would also endow the scene with a heightened sense of the real.
In Friedrich, landscape rarely exists in such magical conformity to the
order of representation. His symmetries, always fragmentary, are staged as


 ’ 

a complex agon between, on the one hand, objects in the world which are
themselves partly symmetrical and which, represented, appear to deter-
mine the order apparent in the image; and, on the other hand, a symmetry
always already inherent in the visual field, whether as the rectangle of the
canvas, or as the bilateral symmetry of the artist’s or the viewer’s bodily
gaze. These symmetries and asymmetries dramatize not so much the
intrinsic order and disorder of nature, nor even the partiality of the
artist/viewer’s own subjective rage for order, but rather precisely the
match and mismatch between the two: that is, the dyadic relation, never
quite symmetrical, between painting and viewer. It would be easy to go one
step further and interpret this potential analogy between pictorial form
and cognitive structure in the light of one of the central motifs of German
Romantic philosophy: the resolution of the subject–object dualism within
the work of art. In the Schelling of the  System of Transcendental
Idealism, for example, the artwork, at once an autonomous production of
the creative subject and a wholly objective thing in the world, is entrusted
with the renovative task of constituting, for the individual, ‘the original
ground of all harmony between the subjective and the objective . . . in its
original identity’. Friedrich, to be sure, makes us uncertain whether the
symmetries we see are inherent in things themselves, or in our experience
of things, and this aporia in itself fosters an exemplary identity between
viewer and viewed. And yet, is the specificity of Friedrich’s system, its
uniqueness vis-à-vis, say, that of an artist like Runge, really addressed if we
read it against, or rather allegorize it as, the System of Schelling? Our own
desire for an interpretative symmetry between the immediate experience of
the work of art and, in this case, the machinery of Idealist metaphysics
must itself be measured against Friedrich’s landscapes, which always also
celebrate the radical alterity of nature, landscape and image through their
attention to the non-systematic: the unpredictable profile of a ruin (illus.
); the random plurality of viewpoints; the unreduplicatable chaos of
shattered ice (illus. ) or of barren branches stretched across the sky; the
lone tree, solitary traveller or single ship on the horizon which must rise
stubbornly at the centre of the picture, neither because it is ‘like ourselves’,
nor because the world is organized around it, but precisely because its
Eigentümlichkeit, its demonstrative this-ness, forbids any answer or symme-
try or repetition or reciprocity.
Friedrich founds his symmetries contingently, on broken analogies
between the cultural and the natural, and between a perceiving mind and an
often cold, inanimate landscape. Occasionally the artist will position some


   

man-made structure at the picture’s centre, allowing it to subsume all nat-

ural surroundings under its symmetrical architecture. In Abbey in the Oak
Forest of – (illus. ), for example, the Gothic monument, while now
a jagged ruin, is perfectly centred and displayed en face, as if to recollect for
us its original symmetry. Around it the bleak landscape seems to respond to
its form. The flanking oaks, though radically individualized in their wild
profiles, are evenly paired off against each other around the central axis; and
the visible extent of the ground-plane, rendered as a murky curve originat-
ing behind the two alders at the lower corners of the canvas, and reaching
up to the level of the ruined abbey’s furthest wall, is reciprocated by the
nebulous shape of the glowing heavens above. At one level, these sym-
metries simply express the analogy, current in Friedrich’s culture since
Goethe’s  essay on the Strasbourg cathedral, between Gothic architec-
ture and the German forest. Landscape can be continuous with the abbey’s
structure because ‘the Gothic’ is itself already a natural or naive architec-
ture, reflective of a religion and a culture that was linked organically to
its time and place, which is the Christian Middle Ages in Germany. As
Romantic ruin or fragment, Friedrich’s cathedral does not really lose its
symmetry. On the contrary, its collapse accommodates it to nature’s chaos,
enabling it to enter in a deeper order, one that allows, as Goethe wrote for
all Gothic forms, ‘the parts to grow together into one eternal whole’.
At another level, however, Friedrich insists that these symmetries are
contingent on our placement before the scene, that were we somehow to
step to the side of our centralized position, the oaks, ruined choir, paired
alders and the whole reciprocity between earth and sky would dissolve
into a jumble of things, like those crooked grave markers rising helter-
skelter from the snow. It is the canvas’s symmetry, its straight edges, rectan-
gular format and measurable midline that recovers the cathedral’s order
within dissolution and transforms a picturesque scene of ruins and church-
yard in the wilderness, common in landscape painting since at least the
Dutch painter Jacob Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery (illus. ), into something
far more personal and disturbing. The landscape’s symmetry, as well as the
attendant analogism between the order of the cathedral and the order of
the canvas, become the consequences of an attitude or activity on the part
of the viewing subject.
This incorporation of the beholder into the whole structure of the vis-
ible is powerfully demonstrated in the pendant canvases Bohemian
Landscape with Milleschauer (illus. ) and Bohemian Landscape with Two
Trees (illus. ), both from  and now in Dresden and Stuttgart


 ’ 

 Jacob Ruisdael, Jewish Cemetery, –. Detroit Institute of Arts.

respectively. Friedrich pairs his pictures not only as terms of a temporal

opposition between morning and evening, but also as alternative relations
between subject and landscape. A spring morning in the Bohemian land-
scape (illus. ) is experienced through the smooth movement of our eye
into depth, carried by a road that winds from the foreground into the
distance, as well as by the broad and various panorama that spreads our
visual attention equally across the visual field. At sunset (illus. ), the path
before us has vanished. Our visual passage into depth has been thwarted
by various barriers running across the whole composition, and our eye is
arrested at two moments in the scene; the poignant gap between the tops
of the two trees in the midground that bend towards each other almost
to form a natural arch and the glow of light spilling from behind the
mountain’s summit to mark the instant of the sun’s departure. Pictorial
symmetry, here trees paired as if in a sacred architecture before a central-
ized sunset, occurs contingent both on the particular placement of the
viewer in space, and on the recorded instant in time. Such contingencies
heighten our sense of our own visual attention, offering within the land-
scape an analogy to the singularity and evanescence of our own experience.
Movement between Friedrich’s pendant scenes of a Bohemian landscape
becomes a shift in us between a diffuse and innocent gaze (the Dresden


   

 Bohemian Landscape with Milleschauer, c. . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,

Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

canvas), and an intensified and, as it were, more self-conscious mode of

seeing (the Stuttgart canvas).
In Abbey in the Oak Forest, Friedrich dramatizes the activity of the
viewing subject within his picture’s human plot: the solemn cortège of
monks marching in pairs and bearing a coffin to an altar lit by candles.
The picture’s structure, continuous with this distant altarpiece, becomes a
version of devotion. We oversee the gaze of one who positions himself in
line with the ritual, and we regard the painted canvas as if it were itself an
altarpiece. And when we recall that Abbey in the Oak Forest was fashioned
as the pendant to Monk by the Sea (illus. ), indeed that its symmetries are,
so to speak, symmetrical to those of its companion piece, the absolutely sub-
jective nature of Friedrich’s system as system becomes apparent. For the
funeral is the artist’s own. At our feet lies his open grave, like some taber-
nacle for a consecrated host, or like the ‘sarcophagus’ which would tradi-
tionally be a German Gothic altarpiece’s predella. Here we can observe the
culmination of that trajectory toward the subjective that we traced from
Emilias Kilde and Scene of Mourning to Fog of . Not only is landscape
itself elegized as monument or tomb, but the original elegist, Friedrich,


 ’ 

has himself become the corpse at the system’s absolute centre. Beyond any
conventional religious allegory of transcendence, beyond any encoding of
the Gothic abbey as ‘Christendom’ and the surrounding oaks as the ‘pagan’
past (Börsch-Supan), Abbey effects and interprets the passage between or-
der and disorder in art, and therefore between identity and alterity in our
cognitive experience. Observing his own funeral with a particularizing
gaze that constitutes the landscape’s fragile symmetry, Friedrich takes us to
the point of our true return to nature – death – and imagines our re-
emergence into ‘one eternal whole’. Yet without lived experience (Erlebnis)
to hold chaos at bay, and without the constructive work of altar, cathedral,
canvas and culture, it remains profoundly uncertain whether this order will
be that of a heavenly Jerusalem, such as Friedrich occasionally constructed
as visionary architecture (e.g. illus.  and ), or that of the macabre corpse
(illus. ), of the body rendered as random as the skeletal branches of the
oak trees.
The Dresden poet, playwright and patriot Theodor Körner wrote two
ekphrastic sonnets on Friedrich’s Abbey in the Oak Forest which were pub-
lished posthumously in . Körner, who died in  as a twenty-
one-year-old volunteer soldier in the war against Napoleon, reads into the
canvas’s funeral procession a consoling message of redemption:

 Landscape with Ruined Wall, c. –. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


   

The fountain of grace flows in death,

And those there are the comrades in bliss,
Who pass through the grave into eternal life.

Religious allegory, however, is only one step along the poem’s way. For
Körner quickly transposes this plot of transcendence discernible within
the landscape into an account log of the painting’s effect on the viewer. By
elevating us to the eternal, Körner argues, Friedrich’s canvas justifies our
faith in the redemptive powers of art per se, and in our own subjective
capacity to feel those powers. Thus the poem concludes:

Here I can boldly trust my heart;

Cold admiration I shall not have – no, I feel,
And in feeling art completes itself.

Art achieves its end here neither in a Christian faith, nor even in the
promise of an afterlife, but rather simply in the evocation of any authen-
tic emotion, an evocation founded upon a certain reciprocity between
painting and viewer, the demonstration of which is Körner’s empathetic
ekphrasis itself.
Friedrich often stages such covenants within his pictures, although
generally with more ambiguity than Körner’s poem-painting would sug-
gest. In a lost canvas dating from , formerly in Weimar, the artist
‘illustrates’ a poem by Goethe entitled Schäfers Klagelied (), in which
a shepherd, mourning the loss of his beloved as he wanders about the
landscape with his flock, discerns in a receding rainbow an emblem of his
desire. Friedrich makes this part of the poem’s plot concrete by stationing
one end of the rainbow above the figure of the shepherd-poet, and the
other end at the vanishing point of his gaze. The rainbow, the traditional
symbol of the covenant between man and God, and therefore of the
promise of passage from this world to eternal life, becomes here a
quasi-diagrammatic link between the shepherd and the landscape.
Quasi-diagrammatic, because even in Goethe’s poem the ‘I’ is never able
to stand within the rainbow’s path, but yearns both for its origin, which
rises ‘above that house’ where the beloved used to dwell, and its end,
which points ‘over the sea’. Quasi-diagrammatic, too, because from our
viewpoint the rainbow constructs a perfect symmetry for the scene, one
which, by implication, idealizes the work of art’s union of poem and
painting, of proximity and distance, of viewer and viewed. That is, by


 ’ 

virtue of its formal symmetry the biblical emblem of covenant is analo-

gized to Romanticism’s dream of an identity between subject and object.
A similar notion informs Friedrich’s roughly contemporary Mountain
Landscape with Rainbow, now in Essen (illus. ). Here the ends of the rain-
bow are coterminous with the limits of the canvas, and the figure in the
landscape, this time a self-portrait of the artist, is placed just off-centre in
the foreground. The painting’s symmetries (the gentle pairing of fore-
ground trees and the placement of the distant mountain’s summit exactly
along the central axis of the canvas) articulate in the horizontal dimension
a reciprocity expressed as well in the vertical: between the oval glow in the
sky just above the rainbow and the oval shape of the lit foreground where
the artist-wanderer stands. In deliberate contradiction to ordinary nature
– for rainbows only appear when their light source lies behind the viewer
– the rainbow expresses the relation between the viewer in the picture and
the apparent goal of his yearning, which is that mysterious oval of light that
illuminates him.
In both Mountain Landscape with Rainbow and the lost Weimar picture,
the rainbow’s structural symmetry functions to idealize the subject–object
dualism of human experience, as it is theorized by Romantic aesthetics.
That the covenant between man and God, which is the rainbow’s conven-
tional symbolic tenor, can now articulate the covenant between the mind

 Landscape with Rainbow, c. . Lost,

formerly Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Weimar.


   

and nature, is predicated on the rainbow’s status as natural occurrence.

Like the Gothic spires in Winter Landscape with Church (illus. ), which
rise symmetrical to the fir grove, but which remain still within the dec-
orum of ordinary, observable nature, Friedrich’s rainbows are at once an
emblem in an allegory and an object in nature, at once the idealizing dia-
gram for and an ordinary object of perception. This distinguishes them
from the symmetrical and ultimately still rococo figurations patterning
the ‘sky’ of Runge’s small Morning: however perfect their shape, and how-
ever magical their fit within the boundaries of the canvas, Friedrich’s rain-
bows belong still to the realm of a landscape that can be experienced
empirically, and therefore of Erlebniskunst. This is perhaps one reason
why Friedrich inhabits both these canvases of  with a human figure
against whom the landscape is paired off as ‘something seen’.
In a number of the artist’s works, such figures, usually depicted with
their backs turned to the viewer, function as a primary device for estab-
lishing the landscape’s formal symmetry. Sometimes they appear in pairs
flanking the canvas’s central vertical axis, so that our eye is held captive in
the narrow interim between their bodies (illus. ); sometimes one stands
alone at the centre of the visual field, so that the landscape appears as a
symmetrical emanation from his or her heart (illus.  and ). In making
the landscape’s order appear as contingent on the order of their bodies,
these figures would offer yet another idealizing account of the relation
between self and object. The randomness and alterity of nature, radical-
ized in Abbey in the Oak Forest as physical death, would then be controlled
through the fiction of a world rendered homologous to our own bilaterally
symmetrical physical being.
Is this really the case in Friedrich’s landscapes, though? In the great
Woman at the Window from , now in Berlin, pictorial symmetry
expresses not an identification with, or immersion in, the landscape, but
rather a separation from it (illus. ). It is true that the thin mullions of
the upper window form a cross centred along the canvas’s midline, and
that this cross, together with the woman’s devotional posture, the triptych
structure of the lower window, and the general austerity of the interior
space endows the whole ensemble with the ‘potential’ character of an
altar, so that random nature should obey the picture’s system, as it did in
the sacralized landscape of Abbey in the Oak Forest. It is also true that
Friedrich has lined up the woman along the central axis of his picture,
focusing her round shadow precisely in the middle of the window niche,
so that represented space should have reciprocity with the human form.


 ’ 

Thus arranged the scene, shaped to our minds as to our bodies, would be
appropriable for us, and our gaze would feel to us like an answered prayer.
Yet is it the reciprocities that keep us looking at, but never fully beyond,
the window and the room? Surely what holds us here are objects and
angles not arranged: the way the window appears centred in the canvas,
while the niche’s flanking walls do not; the many small, rotating window
locks which always point at different angles; the two glass bottles at the
woman’s right; the meticulously rendered dents, scars and blunting of the
window’s wooden sill. Most striking is our tiny view of the landscape out-
side. Narrowed by our distance from the window, and partialized by the
covering presence of the woman, our prospect of nature could hardly be
less ordered and symmetrical. Near the window the upper parts of ships’
masts rise baseless into view, compromising the balance and geometry of
the interior space as they sway this way and that. And deeper into space,
though with no visible connection to the foreground, a shore lined with an
uneven row of poplars runs not quite parallel to the window and therefore
to the picture plane. Landscape here is deliberately fragmented, asym-
metrical and defamiliarized: a domain set radically apart from the woman,
from her ordered and symmetrical domestic space, and from the geometry
of the canvas itself. Friedrich wants us to remember the picture plane as
we peer over the woman’s shoulder into depth; for the proportions of the
canvas’s rectangle are very nearly repeated in the shape of the window
opening through which the woman gazes. The metaphor of painting as
window, dominant in Western pictorial thinking since at least Alberti, is
given a very new inflection here. As window, the canvas does not invite any
easy entrance into the painted world, any fiction of homogeneity between
real and represented space. Rather, the picture-window sequesters us, like
the woman, in a position of exile from, and longing for, what we can
always only partially see.
As a device for structuring pictorial space, of course, strict axial sym-
metry itself tends to resist the eye’s movement into depth, which is why
it is usually banished from classical landscape painting. In Claude Lorrain’s
Coastal Scene with Acis and Galatea of , a work that has hung in the
Dresden Gemäldegalerie since , the lovers’ bower may indeed be cen-
tred in the foreground and framed on either side by coulisses (illus. ).
Yet these flanking forms – the trees to the right and the cliffs to the left –
are never paired off along one line parallel to the picture plane (as are,
say, the oaks in Friedrich’s  Abbey), but are instead staggered in space,
so that our gaze is at once channelled by their forms and drawn into the


   

 Claude
Lorrain, Coastal
Scene with Acis
and Galatea,
. Staatliche
Kunstsamm-
lungen, Gemälde-
galerie, Dresden.

distance. Friedrich’s symmetries forbid such smooth passage. Frequently

they frame a radical discontinuity of space, as when the framing coulisses
of Chalk Cliffs on Rügen of c.  give way, via an abyss, to a flat sheet of
colour whose legibility as ‘sea and sky’ is assured only through the two
tiny sailing boats that float on its surface, unaffected by the laws of per-
spective (illus. ). But more importantly, these symmetries, always felt
as contingent on our own specific point of view, keep us fixed in place
before the picture, so that movement to the side, or into depth, would
throw the entire scene into chaos.
But is this not a peculiarity of Friedrich’s whole ‘system’, on the one
hand, to arrange landscape more strictly than his seventeenth- and eigh-
teenth-century precursors had done, endowing it with a geometry akin to
diagrammatic religious images of a much earlier era; and on the other
hand, to ‘disorganize’ the achieved continuity of traditional pictorial space
by rendering the background radically discontinuous with the foreground,
and by invoking at the horizon an infinity that no system can arrange?
We have already noted how, in Cross in the Mountains, the artist fashions
space through a succession of disjunctive systems, each with its own axis
of symmetry and implied viewpoint. Friedrich develops a number of other
devices for simultaneously organizing and disorganizing the visual field.
Sometimes he foils our visual progress into depth by setting between
us and the horizon a band running parallel to the picture plane and across
the whole visual field. Thus, for example, in Augustus Bridge in Dresden,
produced around , Friedrich constructs his image as a series of un-
interrupted horizontals: the foreground pavement and handrail, the river


 ’ 

 Augustus Bridge in Dresden, c. . Destroyed, formerly Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

that flows below, the Augustus Bridge with its arched piers, the row of
intermittent trees, the ridge of hills and the sky’s stripes of light and clouds
(illus. ). Now classical landscape painters from Claude to Jacob Philipp
Hackert frequently depicted river scenes, delighting in the way the water’s
path through space could ease the eye into depth, while bridges connect-
ing shore to shore unified the picture’s flanking sides. Nothing could be
further from Claude, however, than Friedrich’s grid-like composition, in
which any centralized passage into distance is blocked, and the whole spec-
tacle, lacking in any internal frame, stands radically open at both sides.
Rather than flowing into space, the Elbe runs directly under the bridge on
which we are positioned and across the whole visual field; and the Augustus
Bridge, instead of connecting flanking shores, extends indefinitely beyond
the picture’s sides and effects and abrupt leap into depth.
Such leaps, I believe, are thematized in Friedrich’s curious Garden
Terrace, first exhibited at the Berlin Art Academy in  (illus. ).
Again space is built up as a series of horizontal bands: the intermittent
pavements and strips of grass in the foreground, the garden wall, and the
panorama of the mountains beyond. Within and among these bands
Friedrich establishes relative symmetries: the two chestnut trees placed


   

 Garden Terrace, –. Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten, Potsdam.

equidistant to the edges of the canvas, the pattern of grass and bushes
flanking a classical statue of a woman, the stone lions guarding the gate,
and the pyramid of the highest mountain, whose summit occurs directly
above the statue. Friedrich, who after his Copenhagen period almost
never depicted park scenes, renders foreground and background spatial-
ly discreet, as zones which we could code variously as garden versus
landscape, culture versus nature, Neo-classical park versus Romantic
wilderness, as well as, perhaps, French artifice versus German natural-
ism, and mediated knowledge (the woman reading, oblivious to her sur-
roundings) versus immediate experience (the world beyond the garden
and book). However we choose to interpret the succession of systems in
Friedrich’s picture, its effect is to establish the alterity of landscape, and
the affirm a split between self and world such as was monumentalized in
Woman at the Window.
Friedrich frequently fragments space by constructing his foregrounds
as screens which obscure much of our view of what lies behind. Observe,
for example, the extraordinary placement of a stone wall and closed gate
right up against the picture plane in The Churchyard of the late s


 ’ 

(illus. ). More commonly he simply omits a visible midground from his
scenes. The foreground summit in Cross in the Mountains, covering any hint
of landscape beyond, is set immediately against the sky, as figure against
ground, which is partly why Ramdohr criticized the canvas as a landscape
structured as if it were a portrait or history painting. Other contemporaries
took pleasure in such radical elisions. Johanna Schopenhauer, for example,
writing in an issue of Journal of Luxury and Fashion in , notes approv-
ingly that Friedrich omits from his canvases ‘midground and background
. . . because he chooses objects in which these are not to be represented.
He likes to paint unfathomable expanses.’
One of the most haunting instances of such an elision is Friedrich’s tiny
canvas of a Hill and Ploughed Field near Dresden, dating from around 
and now in Hamburg (illus. ). Landscape here is not arranged as a
‘view’, but rather as the obstruction of view. Instead of shaping themselves
around our centralized gaze, as the frame for a prospect of the city, the
foreground earth, meadow and trees rise up before us concealing any conti-
nuity to the distance, a convexity reaching almost to the horizon line and
open at both sides. As in the similarly ordered Evening Star, now in Frank-
furt (illus. ), Friedrich shows just enough of Dresden’s silhouette to
fix our eve on the foreground’s edge as we make out the shapes of the
Kreuzkirche, Frauenkirche, Schlossturm and Hofkirche. The longer we
dwell on this baseless cityscape, however, the more powerfully felt the
swelling foreground mass becomes. Thwarting our desire for a panoptic
view, and undermining therefore our sense of visual mastery, Friedrich
trains our eye on things that would, in the traditional veduta, be merely
peripheral: the parallel pattern of ploughed furrows which lead the eye
out of the picture to the left; the maze of branches that, spread out against
the sky like the alders of From the Dresden Heath, entangle our gaze in its
disorder; and the hectic flight of birds, here not guiding our vision into
depth, but rather returning us from the horizon at the left back to the soil
at our feet, and to that red rose whose strangeness to the landscape
eclipses Dresden’s beautiful towers. Indeed Friedrich’s foreground has
the uncanny effect of inverting the whole geometry of landscape paint-
ing’s vision. Instead of descending to the city below along a centralized
channel of vision, our gaze must always climb the swelling foreground
whose highest point lies at the picture’s core; and instead of plunging into
depth, our eye is always caught and doubles back to what lies close at
hand, there to find the commonplace (earth, grass and trees) estranged
and unfamiliar.


   

Our expectations are subverted partly by the way our eye ‘reads’
Friedrich’s principal diagonals, here the sloping limits of the foreground
hill. Like the steeper slopes of the summit in Cross in the Mountains, the
diagonals in Hill and Ploughed Field, legible as perspective lines converg-
ing at a horizon, lead the eye falsely into depth, destabilizing our experi-
ence of represented space. Sometimes Friedrich’s diagonals do indeed
lead into the distance, as when, in Evening Star, the great bands of the sky,
along with the path rising from the left in the foreground, all appear to
converge somewhere beyond the canvas’s right edge. Yet here the imag-
ined vanishing point is endlessly displaced, for as they pass out of the pic-
ture, these quasi-orthogonals run virtually parallel to the horizon, evoking
thereby an infinity that simply cannot be pictured. Sometimes Friedrich
will juxtapose different kinds of diagonals within a single image, as when,
in the Hanover Morning (Departure of the Boats) of c. –, the reced-
ing line of sailing boats leads us to the horizon, while the similarly
arranged poles at the left leave us in the foreground (illus. ). Here, too,
the wings of the airborne gulls, echoing in their shape both the curved
upper edges of the receding sails and the Y-shaped tips of the poles, render
different objects and different positions in space as equivalent patterns on
the picture plane. This conceit serves to articulate the canvas’s overt theme
of leave-taking. The receding boats articulate the experience of departure
through an actual disappearance of the objects of our vision, while the poles
locate us back on shore, intensifying our sense of having been abandoned
and evoking a feeling of bereavement.
A similar logic is at work in the roughly contemporary Woman at the
Sea, now in Winterthur (illus. ). Friedrich constructs space through an
odd conjunction of two principal diagonals: in the foreground, the flat
bases of the boulders describe a straight line running from the lower left
corner point of the canvas, along the rock on which the woman in red is
seated and off to sea at the right; and further into space, a row of sailing
boats just off shore establishes an orthogonal that passes from somewhere
out of the picture at the right to the precise point where the horizon meets
the picture’s left framing edge. Such precision optics, like Friedrich’s rigid
pictorial symmetries, staples the structure of nature to the order of repre-
sentation. It testifies, above all, to the presence of system per se, although
this system may be radically incomplete and wholly at odds with the con-
ventions of linear perspective. For unlike orthogonals, which originate at a
picture’s lower framing edge and converge at the landscape’s horizon, the
principal diagonals of Woman at the Sea run from significant points along


 Cemetery Entrance, c. –. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.


   

the right side of the canvas (horizon line above and lower framing edge
below) to converge offstage to the right. This reorientation of spatial con-
struction appears motivated by the pose and outline of the woman in red,
who, unlike most of Friedrich’s staffage figures, is represented from the
side rather than the rear. The displacement of the painting’s focus from a
centralized point on the horizon to an imagined point off to the right artic-
ulates the altered directionality of this internal viewer’s body and gaze, as
indeed does the whole geography of the scene, which appears as a bay of
water open to the right. As if to diagram this intertwining of viewer and
viewed, Friedrich establishes a number of peculiar chiasmi. While the
diagonal the sailing boats describe leads our eye properly into depth, the
boats themselves travel towards the foreground, their path intersecting the
line of the woman’s gaze at the point where the picture’s principal diago-
nals converge. And against the wedge enclosed by these diagonals, and
against the similarly shaped wedge of the woman’s reclining body, Friedrich
establishes countermovements in the angles enclosed by the boats them-
selves (between their diagonally slanting masts and their wedge-like bodies),
and in the woman’s analogously wedge-shaped bonnet which, while con-
cealing from us her eye, suggests her cone of vision. In innumerable ways,
Woman at the Sea maps together Romantic landscape’s dual infinities – self
and world – as if in cross-section.
Monk by the Sea, probably Friedrich’s greatest shore scene, uses the
diagonal in yet another novel way, one which is more typical of the artist’s
compositional procedure (illus. ). At the opening of his pioneering
study of pictorial structure in Friedrich, Helmut Börsch-Supan discerned
in the Berlin canvas the culmination of the artist’s early development of a
‘contrastive style’, in which foreground and background are set against
each other as horizontal versus vertical, figure versus ground, finitude
versus infinitude and detailed treatment versus generalized. To establish
these contrasts, Börsch-Supan argued, Friedrich not only eliminated from
his scenes a connective midground, but also evoked an infinite expanse
between the two pictorial zones. This was achieved by simultaneously
deploying and rupturing the diagonals of conventional linear perspective.
In Monk by the Sea, the pale, broad triangle of the foreground shore,
together with the roughly symmetrical descending triangle of the lit sky
above the bank of clouds, draw our eye into a certain depth, simply be-
cause we read their sloping sides as if they were orthogonals constructing
space. The diagonals here, however, do not converge at the horizon to fash-
ion the  of perspectival composition, but rather, pointing only partway


 ’ 

into space, they stall us at the disparate apices of earth and sky. Beyond
these points begins another kind of space and another kind of system, one
whose only markings are the unbroken line of the horizon and the white
spots of intermittent gulls and whitecaps.
We know from -ray photographs and from contemporary accounts
that this central strip of ‘sea and clouds’ was the work of ongoing revision,
reduction and concealment. In its initial phase, late  to February
, Monk by the Sea had a uniformly grey sky and sailing ships were vis-
ible on the sea. Sometime later, before June , the sky was repainted a
dark blue and the moon and stars were added. And by the time the work
was shown at the Berlin Academy exhibition in October , this evening
sky was again overpainted with its present mix of clouds, light blue sky
and descending fog, and the ships were painted out, creating a landscape
of unprecedented emptiness which delighted and disturbed contempor-
ary viewers.
One obvious consequence of this process is that the paint surface of
the canvas, particularly in the area above the horizon, appears quite dense
or pasty, which is highly unusual for Friedrich, who generally applies
colour in thin transparent glazes that betray no evidence of brushwork
and little of the physical presence of paint. This density in Monk by the
Sea intensifies the contrast between foreground and background. For if at
the horizon we experience a thickening of paint, the area closest to us –
those pale dunes touched here and there by the sparsest grass – has the
colour of unprimed canvas. Thus just as he had disrupted the structure of
linear perspective, Friedrich overturns the procedures of aerial perspec-
tive, which traditionally represents the world as thinnest at its distance.
Instead of receding easily into depth, our eye slips past the ethereal fore-
ground, only to be baffled by a plane of palpable, sluggish paint. The
clouds above the blackish green ocean weigh almost physically on our eye,
causing us to look upwards and recover in the triangle of lighter sky an
open avenue for our sight. The leap between the two triangles (foreground
and sky), which is also a leap across the disruption within conventional
perspective, re-enacts the picture’s ostensible plot as the trajectory of our
vision. For what does the monk’s attitude dramatize, there at the brink of
the world (at the foreground’s apex which should be the landscape’s van-
ishing point), but a yearning for transcendence, for passage beyond the
materiality of earthly existence.
In the pendant Abbey in the Oak Forest, the light triangle of sky has
become the curved glow of heaven (illus. ). And while the monk will be


   

 J.M.W. Turner,
The Angel Standing
in the Sun, .
Tate, London.

buried in the foreground, the restored symmetry of the centralized Gothic

ruin, rising above the darkened in-between of the graveyard to an area
fashioned of the thinnest paint, ritually traverses the distance between pic-
torial zones, and between system and non-system. That Friedrich achieves
these ends in Monk by the Sea within the play between the orthogonals and
the blankness of a void is more than merely an ‘allegory’ of the human
condition. Dressed in the habit of a monk, and assuming the traditional
posture of melancholy (head in hand), Friedrich is the Romantic subject
at the limits of his world, which are also the limits of his artistic means. For
what the artist represents in this canvas, as in all his works which combine
fragment and system, is not quite the structure of transcendence, but rather
transcendence as the dissolution of structure: here the distant horizon
transformed into an all too close surface of paint.
It is true that Friedrich, unlike his English contemporary J.M.W.
Turner, rarely invokes the materialitv of paint to disorganize pictorial
illusion (illus. ). In the much later Large Enclosure, dating from 
and now in Dresden (illus. ), the compositional arrangement of the
landscape is similar to that of Monk by the Sea: the foreground diagonals,
legible as orthogonals, and the sky’s V are again separated by a broad
band of discontinuous background. Yet in Large Enclosure this area
around the horizon has been given an altogether different character. As
Richard Wollheim remarked, Friedrich stations us directly above the fore-
ground water, allowing the silted Elbe river to run ‘on under the point


 ’ 

from which it is represented’. Friedrich, that is, draws us immediately

into the landscape by making our physical viewpoint somehow part of the
picture. Once thus installed, we move easily into depth along the veering
diagonals of the foreground. The scale of this recession is, however, pro-
foundly ambiguous and calls into question the posited belonging between
viewer and viewed. The sky is mirrored doubly in the foreground river,
both as a reflection on the water’s surface and as a symmetry between the
patches of purple clouds and the pattern of silting in the river. This
encourages us to imagine a foreground as capacious as the broad sky. And
as many commentators have noticed, the river’s diagonals are subtly bent,
as if to map the rectilinear progression of orthogonals into depth on to
the curvature of the earth itself. The river, and with it our immediate
standpoint, becomes an analogy of the whole of the world, and the sailing
boat travelling on the further bank occupies a threshold akin to the point in-
habited by the monk in Monk by the Sea. Yet beyond this world Friedrich
does not raise a wall of paint or a groundless abyss, but simply another
world. Receding far less dramatically into depth, and mirrored only by a
sky of solid purple, this world of flat meadows, trees and low hills is far
more familiar, more canny than the colossal, histrionic foreground to
which we belong. It is as if, late in his career, Friedrich discovers that
what lies at the far side of his system, in the rupture of landscape’s space,
is not a transcendence beyond the world, but rather simply the return to,
or recuperation of a reciprocal being in, this world.
In Monk by the Sea, Friedrich disrupts the illusion of a world contin-
uous with the self not only through ‘contrastive’ compositional strategies,
but also through shifts within his painterly manner. Of course, the height-
ened fracture of paint surface above the sea’s horizon may be the
by-product of a specific historical moment in the artist’s development:
Friedrich’s epochal invention of an emptied landscape through a singular
process of indecision and deletion rather than through a premeditated
minimalism. Yet this disruptive appearance of paint qua paint also lies
well within Friedrich’s – and Romanticism’s – general project. In
Athenaeum , Schlegel writes that Romantic art must ‘hover at the mid-
point between the represented and the representer . . . on the wings of
poetic reflection’. Like Romantic irony, which evokes the infinite through
the bathetic collapse of evocation, and like Romantic allegory, which, as
we shall see, generates endless meanings in the desire for, but absence of,
a totalizing meaning, Friedrich’s system, always self-consuming, is the
demonstration of the limits of system. And in the case of Monk by the Sea


   

this limit, peopled by the representer-viewer in the monastic habit of

unbridgeable Eigentümlichkeit, appears as nothing less than the materiality
of painting itself. From there, as Gottfried Benn wrote in his verse cycle
Alaska: ‘Alles ist Ufer. Ewig ruft das Meer’ (Everything is shore. Eternally
summons the sea).


 7
Symbol and Allegory

In Cross in the Mountains, everything is threshold, and eternity is voiced

not by the sea, but variously by the abyss beyond the summit, the vault of
the heavens and its culmination in the palm leaves and putti of the arched
upper frame, and the myth of death and resurrection implied by Christ
and his emblem, the setting and rising sun. Friedrich fashions landscape
as the edge of an infinity. The dark form of the mountain appears at first
glance as pure silhouette on the sky. The sloping and symmetrical sides of
the summit and of the individual fir trees, as well as the diagonals of the
clouds, read as orthogonals of steep and disparate ground-planes, and
therefore guide the eye everywhere to the brink of an abyss. And the
carved effigy of Christ, shown from behind and in lost profile, reveals
the border of a face traced with reflected light, or rather the edge of a gaze
that can see beyond all edges to the source of light at the real limits of the
world – the sun upon the horizon.
Nor will it be lost to anyone who beholds Friedrich’s ‘altarpiece’ as a
whole that what lies hidden in the landscape, just beyond all these con-
cealing edges, is recuperated at the picture’s actual limits, in the carved
and gilt frame that simultaneously encloses and interprets the mountain
scene. In the ensemble’s lower panel or predella, the emblem of an eye
within a triangle not only dedicates the altar to its deity, the Christian God
here conventionalized as the all-seeing gaze enframed by the radiance of
the Trinity. It also duplicates and completes the very structure of the
painted scene. The summit’s pyramid, cleansed of its slight asymmetries
and surface objects, reappears as the similarly proportioned and oriented
isosceles triangle below. The hidden gaze of Christ’s effigy, as well as its
obscured object – the sun – becomes the eye/sun at the triangle’s centre.
The quasi-diagrammatic rays of light on the evening sky become further
systematized as the surrounding nimbus. And the arching clouds in the
landscape become the arch of palm leaves and the Eucharistic wheat and
grapevine signifying Christ’s death and eternal life. Painting and frame, it
would seem, interpret one another. Yet it is hard to tell which is the text


   

and which the commentary. Beyond whatever Christian or private icono-

graphies might control the whole, the formal resemblances between what
is in the picture and what is carved outside as its surrounds, and therefore
between landscape and diagram, between the mimesis of a ‘whole’ of
nature and an arabesque of parts and emblems, function to extend past
the material limits of the represented scene those contrasts multiplied
everywhere within Friedrich’s landscapes: real/ideal, finite/infinite, this
world/the next and so forth.
The art of Philipp Otto Runge provides the closest precedents for this
leakage of the work of art into the instruments of its enclosure. In small
Morning, executed in  but dependent on a number of project drawings
dating back to , the frame’s surfaces are treated as a continuous pic-
torial field, and its scene repeats the plot of the central panel (illus. ). In
the ‘landscape’ scene, the newborn child in the foreground, the allegorical
figure of Aurora-Venus-Mary striding above the horizon in the manner of
Raphael’s Dresden Madonna, and the natural setting with its sunrise and
spring flora, all collectively express the idea of morning. The frame sim-
ply extends this proliferation of beginnings, for example, in the emer-
gence of the sun from darkness, in the organic growth embodied by the
amaryllis and its paired genii of root and flower, and in the rays of emer-
gent light mingled with the glory of cherubs above. Nothing in their scale,
manner of execution, or level of naturalism distinguishes these enframing
images from the figures they surround; by which Runge implies that dawn
overturns all ends, nights, boundaries or limits, even those inherent in the
finitude and closure of the artwork. The colouristic link between the black
angels of night vanishing at the upper corners of the central panel and the
narrow black mouldings separating painting from frame and frame from
world, reiterates this hyperbole of origination’s expansiveness.
Friedrich might have learnt from the small Morning how a peculiar
interpenetration of nature and symbol, and of object and meaning, can be
expressed as a reciprocity between picture and frame. Runge was able to
diagram this interpenetration variously and to explicate its terms. In a
now lost sketch from , for example, he maps the elements of colour
(R = ‘red’, V = ‘violet’, B = ‘blue’, etc.) on to areas of a six-pointed star,
labelling its upper part ‘the Ideal’ and its lower ‘the Real’ (illus. ). This
gesture of picturing, in terms of colour, line and figure, such metaphysical
categories, and of proclaiming, as Runge does in a roughly contemporary
text, that ‘transparent and opaque have a relation to each other like ideal
and real’, presupposes a certain conception of painting’s link to theory,


   

 Philipp Otto
Runge, The Contrast
Ideal – Real, –.

and of an image’s link to exegesis. However complex its details, Runge’s

symbolic programme inhabits equally ‘landscape’, enframing ornament,
geometrical chart and explanatory text.
Given the expansiveness of Runge’s system, it is tempting to transpose
the statement, say, about the transparent and the opaque on to Friedrich’s
Cross in the Mountains. The dark and impenetrable summit that is the pic-
ture’s only proper land-scape would thus be interpretable as the Real
which, rising up before the diaphane sky, conceals from us the sun as the
Ideal par excellence. Runge’s little sketch Ideal–Real could equally serve as
exegesis of Friedrich’s canvas. The pyramid of the mountain superim-
posed upon the inverted triangle of the sun’s rays configures a similar
six-pointed star, which would then encode the scene as a paysage moralisé
with the cross at the positive pole and the earth at the negative. It is easy,
as well, to discern in Cross in the Mountains many specific visual echoes of
the small Morning. The arched upper frame in Friedrich, with its palm
leaves and winged putti, resembles the curved design of the angels of night
in Runge. And such elements in Cross in the Mountains as the silver star at
the top of the ensemble, the vegetable forms of the framing’s flanking
‘Gothic’ columns and the radiant sky of the painted landscape itself all have
clear precedents in the small Morning. So does, as we have seen, Friedrich’s
use of pictorial symmetry. One might infer from such similarities that these
two Romantic paintings also mean in analogous ways. Friedrich’s crucifix,


   

mountain, hidden sun and whole assemblage of objects in the landscape,

whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, systematized or wilfully chaotic,
would therefore be, as in Runge’s ensemble, simple translations, albeit in
a different pictorial idiom, of ideas and events already developed on the
carved frame.
How true is this, though, to our actual experience of Friedrich’s land-
scape? The work’s gilt frame stands before us measured and symmetrical,
the eye of God returning perfectly our gaze. And if elsewhere in
Friedrich’s œuvre the instruments of Christian devotion are only dimly
legible, as ruins within, or echoes among, natural forms, here the struc-
ture of the altarpiece appears as the actual frame through which landscape
is viewed and understood. Yet as our gaze passes through this portal into
the painted world, we discover everywhere the subtle dissolution of sym-
metry, the fragmentation of a centralized viewpoint, and the turning away
of God’s eye toward the hidden sun. If Runge represents the idealization
of the relation between painting and symbol, Friedrich demonstrates the
instability of this ideal. When the enframing emblem becomes landscape
in Cross in the Mountains, when the religious symbol becomes natural object,
something is visibly lost, and we enter into a changed relation to what we
see. This loss is felt first as a difference in orientation, a shift within the
fabric of vision. Instead of encountering us full-face, as it were, like Runge’s
striding figure of the Virgin Aurora, Friedrich’s landscape, with its crucifix,
turns its back on us, and with this is diminished the immanent legibility
of the world.
In his critique of Cross in the Mountains, Ramdohr argued that
Friedrich’s elaborate carved frame is at least intended to determine the
painted landscape’s overall meaning and function. Alone the frame, ‘with
its symbols’, both arouses in the viewer the suspicion ‘that an allegorical
meaning lies here submerged’, and ‘determines the painting as an altar-
piece’. Isolated, that is, from the surrounding grapes, wheat, palm leaves,
and all-seeing eye, Friedrich’s landscape would be merely landscape,
empty of significance beyond what meets the eye, and bearing scant rela-
tion to that class of images at the heart of the Christian ritual. For in
Ramdohr’s semiotics, landscape simply cannot be allegorical, since the
presence of allegory can only be signalled, its message only conveyed, by
objects or events out of keeping with the natural order. At best landscape
painting can convey a human message of the most general kind, picturing
how people did or should live, or evoking some common sentiment (ter-
ror, joy, sadness, etc) through appropriate objects and environs. Jacob


   

Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery, formerly in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie

stands for Ramdohr as the acme of landscape’s expressivity, for it evinces
in us not only a solemn mood, but a religious conviction of ‘the vanity, and
evanescence of all human things’. Yet such a picture does not constitute
allegory. It simply awakens sentiments already associated with Ruisdael’s
motif as it would exist in nature – a graveyard in a sublime setting – and
the intensity of the evocation alone is the artist’s proper achievement.
We have already chronicled the emergence of Friedrich’s art from pre-
cisely this kind of painting, in which the objects of nature mean in so far
as they offer analogies to moral sentiment. Ramdohr would have been com-
fortable with at least the semantic assumptions underlying an image like
Scene of Mourning (illus. ), or the slightly earlier Emilias Kilde (illus. ),
even if he would probably have found fault with their composition.
Friedrich, of course, is also capable of fashioning pictures which are al-
legorical in Ramdohr’s sense, that is, which introduce supernatural, exotic
or radically anachronistic elements into the landscape, or so formalize
nature’s structure that it approaches the diagrammatic character of the
frame of Cross in the Mountains. Vision of the Christian Church of , in
which two heathen Druids wreathed in oak leaves stand amazed at the
mystical appearance of a Christian church in the sky, is a curious example
(illus. ). Instead of enframing mute landscape, as in Cross in the
Mountains, Gothic architecture is here itself enframed in a legible assem-
blage of obvious symbols. Works such as this are, however, anomalies with-
in Friedrich’s œuvre.
The artist generally tries to achieve exactly what Ramdohr determines
cannot be done, namely, to signal the presence of an occulted meaning in
the landscape without, however, compromising the structural or temporal
integrity of the natural world.
In Cross in the Mountains, the frame is this signal. Its symmetrical
architecture supplements and intensifies the formalism of the painted
scene, while its overall format refigures the landscape thus enclosed into
the intentionality of the Christian altarpiece. The signs on its surface
announce their character as signs through their non-mimetic design, their
arbitrary fragmentation of natural forms and jarring juxtapositions of
shapes and objects, as well as through their overtly conventional charac-
ter, their felt adherence to the lexical canon of Christian symbols.
Through these signs’ homothetic relation to natural objects represented
in the painting, they by extension also subsume landscape under their
specific mode of referentiality. The mountain is thus fashioned into a


 Vision of the Christian Church, c. . Collection Georg Schäfer,
Obbach near Schweinfurt.


   

 The Cathedral,
c. . Collection
Georg Schäfer,
Obbach near
Schweinfurt.

trinitarian symbol, and the arching clouds, mirroring the frame’s

Eucharistic motif of grapes and wheat and its crowning palm leaves,
become signs of a specifically Christian eternity. Yet this transumption of
heterogenous and multivalent nature into the fixity of human signifiers is
also felt to be only partial. This is why Ramdohr states that, while it makes
an altarpiece of the ensemble and an allegory of the landscape, ‘The frame
is without any relation to the painting.’
It is difficult for us today to recuperate this original sense of separa-
tion. The split which Ramdohr experiences between symbolic frame and
painted landscape is partly bound up with his conception of form, and of
form’s alterity vis-à-vis meaning or content. While he aptly characterizes
Friedrich’s ‘system’, describing its irrational structures and contradictory
viewpoints and space, he is unable, or unwilling, to regard such qualities
as themselves having meaning. This is perhaps the most curious historical


   

feature of the whole debate over Cross in the Mountains. Neither Ramdohr,
nor his Romantic opponents, nor even Friedrich himself ever articulate what
seems obvious to any present-day student of Friedrich’s art: namely, that
such elements as the abyss between foreground and background, or the
play of junction and disjunction between picture and frame, might have
semantic value, articulating, say, the difficult relation between the finite
and the infinite, the material and the spiritual, earth and heaven, or indeed
between the whole host of opposing contraries whose synthesis was the
stated task of Romantic art and the Idealist philosophy of identity. A proper-
ly historical interpretation of Friedrich’s art, one which can account for this
curious omission in the critical discourse of the period, will be less con-
cerned with uncovering the various possible meanings – political, religious,
biographical or economic – that might inform specific images, than with
accounting for how such images were thought to mean.
Again it is Ramdohr who offers crucial evidence for our argument.
Having described how, through its symbolic frame, Cross in the Mountains
alerts its viewers that ‘behind the natural scene . . . a hidden allegorical
meaning lies hidden’, Ramdohr asks what, specifically, this meaning might
be. His answer takes the form of a remarkable account, claimed to be
Friedrich’s own, of the artist’s original experience of a cross in the moun-
tains. It remains unclear whether Ramdohr simply fabricated this detailed
commentary, which is written in the first person and set apart from the
rest of the review by quotation marks, or whether he somehow heard or
read it when he visited Friedrich’s atelier in Dresden. Its authentically
Romantic character, together with the fact that Ramdohr’s detractors
never disputed its authenticity, convinces me that it indeed reflects
Friedrich’s own reading of his ensemble.
Travelling through a mountain landscape before daybreak, we read, the
artist first wanders in darkness, then perceives the first glow of dawn, and
finally beholds the rays of a risen sun shining from behind a mountain, so
that its summit is a sharp silhouette against the sky. At its peak stands a
crucifix with its face turned toward the far side of the mountain; the artist
‘deduces’ this position from how the sunlight is reflected on the crucifix.
The tableau thus complete, the artist interprets what he sees:

How meaningful this sight! The crucified Christ in a wilderness! At

the threshold between darkness and light! Yet enthroned above
nature’s highest, visible to all who seek Him! But He, He beholds
the light face to face; and to us, surrounded by twilight in this vale


   

of tears, to us, whose weak eye cannot yet bear the full radiance of
clarity, to us He imparts but a reflection of the same! Thus, as herald
of the salvation that awaits us, He becomes simultaneously media-
tor between earth and heaven. And we, we are comforted and rejoice
in His message and His works, just as, after a long dark night, we
rejoice at the approach of the sun when we observe its illumination
and its effects earlier than its appearance. Here I felt the need to
celebrate that commemorative rite which, itself a secret, is the sym-
bol of another [secret]: the Incarnation and Resurrection of the Son
of God.

The mass which Friedrich vows here to celebrate, we are meant to infer,
is the Cross in the Mountains. Through its symbolic frame and planned
chapel setting, the natural scene evocative of the Eucharist’s meaning
becomes an actual altar for the sacrament.
At one level, the artist’s commentary simply decodes the landscape
according to a system of analogies. The painting’s stark contrasts of light
and dark become signs of a cosmic relation between heaven and earth; the
hidden sun’s visible rays articulate the extent of God’s presence in this
world, as word and works rather than full epiphany; the reversed crucifix,
read through the metaphoricity of God’s face in I Corinthians ,
becomes both the visual embodiment of the still-hidden God and the
expression of Christ’s status as mediating vision; and the picture’s whole
play of showing and concealing, as well as its placement of the viewer at
the threshold of the visible, is invested with a specific religious dimension,
as model of the structure of divine revelation in the world. The expansion
of the analogon, however, will not stop at the potentially total codification
of nature as a legible Book of God. The ‘meaningful’ appearance of the
mountain scene, first felt by the artist in nature, opens secrets within
secrets within secrets; or, as Joseph von Görres wrote in  of Runge’s
hieroglyphic art, ‘The secret remains eternally unfathomable, because
every solution always becomes again a new puzzle.’
In Friedrich, the carved and gilt summit cross interprets a landscape
that interprets the Eucharist that signifies Christ whose meaning now,
through the artist’s commentary, explicates the painted and gilt Cross in
the Mountains that, in turn, should interpret the Eucharist performed
before it, and so forth. This maddening sense of enfolding without closure,
of centres becoming frames and of tenors becoming vehicles, functions to
ward off any final statement of the picture’s meaning. It places at the heart


   

of our experience of the artwork not a single message, nor even quite the
sheer proliferation of messages, but rather the encounter with a process and
agency of mediation per se: the infinitely meaningful, never fully exhaust-
ible ‘symbol’, of which nature, religion, art and commentary are but so
many local inflections.
While Friedrich’s commentary cannot determine the master-allegory
of Cross in the Mountains, as Ramdohr would wish, it does establish a total-
ity which is the source of the entire configuration of partial allegories:
the artist’s originary experience. By offering a moment in his own biogra-
phy as the interpretation of his landscape/altarpiece, Friedrich signals a
change in the way art is intended to be made and understood, a change
which we described earlier as the invention of Erlebniskunst. For what
occupies the traditional place of the altar’s cult image, indeed what is com-
memorated in the rite of viewing Cross in the Mountains, is no longer the
God whose ubiquity is celebrated in the Eucharist, nor even a narrative of
the historical moment of His sacrifice on Calvary, but rather a moment
in Caspar David Friedrich’s life when a landscape, together with an old
emblem of Christ, suddenly appeared to the artist as an apt symbol of
the Eucharist. When, for example, the artist remarks that he ‘deduced’
the reversed position of the summit cross from the way it reflected light,
thus recalling his own cognitive leap from uncertainty to surmise, he not
only maps our visual aporia as viewers of his painting on to his own orig-
inal experience of landscape, he also signals that the whole chain of
analogies that follow is predicated on an act of his mind, and therefore
that the universality of such meanings is founded less on the validity of
the religious faith that they affirm than on the universality of artistic
genius itself.
These are aesthetic principles that Ramdohr cannot accept. He objects
to the hermetic nature of Friedrich’s picture. If a painting is to function
as altarpiece, Ramdohr contends, its meaning must be apparent to all, yet
the allegory of Cross in the Mountains is open only ‘to the perspecuity of a
select few’. This indictment locates one of Romanticism’s abiding contra-
dictions. On the one hand, Romantic artists burden themselves with the
task of forging anew a religion and a mythology which would be univer-
sally valid for their society, hence Friedrich’s presumption to produce a
novel landscape that might also be a working religious image. The retable
altarpiece is not only an instrument of faith, but also an idealizing symbol
of a perfect reciprocity between art and society that had been lost since the
Middle Ages. On the other hand, because it is the uniqueness of genius


   

that makes such extravagant projects possible, the artist’s productions will
at most represent particular fulfilments, his renewed religion and self-
originated myths being viable therefore only for an intensely particular
audience. Romanticism’s ‘community-creating’, as Hans-Georg Gadamer
writes, ‘merely testifies to the disintegration that is taking place’. In
Friedrich’s case, this contradiction grows acute over time. From the s
his public dwindled, and contemporaries regarded his pictures as ever more
private and arcane.
Ramdohr does not object to the specific sentiments articulated in
Friedrich’s commentary. He disputes, as he puts it, the ‘when and where’
of their expression, by which he means their status as the content of a
landscape painting. Instead Ramdohr proposes a fascinating alternative:
‘If the owner of a chapel near such a mountain with crucifix were to have
an opening set in the altar, so that the gaze of the faithful who approach
the altar would be led perspectivally towards the natural scene’, then
indeed the prospect might summon certain viewers ‘to a solemn mood
similar to the one Herr F. might have experienced’. Cross in the Mountains,
however, is not nature but ‘a painted picture, a work of art . . . and here
quite different questions come into consideration’. By ‘questions’ the crit-
ic means the whole discourse of academic criticism, with its canon of
rules based on past example, its division and hierarchy of the genres, and
its particular conception of the artwork’s unity and closure. To set these
‘questions’ into play, though, Ramdohr must first posit a distinction,
indeed the exemplary distinction that sets Ramdohr and the entire rhetor-
ical tradition since Antiquity off against the aesthetics of Romanticism,
between experience and the representation of experience. For it is the era-
sure of that distinction that characterizes what the Romantics call the
‘symbol’, and that constitutes Friedrich’s break with Sentimentalism.
But already Ramdohr separates art from experience in a manner rem-
iniscent of Erlebniskunst. His vision of the altarpiece as opening on to a
quasi-sacral landscape is clearly implied by Friedrich’s Cross in the
Mountains, which structures its gilt frame as a window on to the artist’s
original and fully embodied experience of landscape. More than any other
artist of the period, Friedrich perfected and elaborated the motif of a view
through an open window, which was for him a metaphor for the subjective
status of art and of vision. Already in his powerful  sepia of a View
from the Artist’s Atelier, Left Window (illus. ), a work which was well
received in the exhibition of the Weimar Kunstfreunde in , Friedrich
encodes the relation between interior and exterior as a play between self


   

 August Wilhelm Ahlborn,

Cloister Cemetery near the
Watzmann, . Schloss
Charlottenburg, Berlin.

and world, consciousness and nature, by including at the left of his win-
dow a partial image of himself (specifically his eyes) in a looking-glass.
The mirror’s reflection and the window’s view are both in their own way
‘self ’ portraits: one picture the artist’s gaze, the other the content thereof.
When Friedrich painted his atelier fourteen years later in Woman at the
Window (illus. ), this expansion of self became thematized as longing,
and the bodies assumed a posture vis-à-vis the natural scene akin to prayer
or supplication. An interesting fusion of such window scenes with the
structure of an altarpiece is suggested in a canvas of  by the minor
Berlin painter and Schinkel-copyist August Wilhelm Ahlborn (illus. ).
The arched opening with Gothic tracery enframes and therefore unifies
the scene of crucifix, cemetery and mountain landscape, while also sepa-
rating out the foreground monk in his attitude of devotion. Ahlborn’s
painting is something of a pastiche of Friedrich’s art. In addition to his
use of the Rückenfigur, note the window motif, crucifix in the landscape,
cloister graveyard and Gothic frame, as well as the depiction of the
Watzmann mountain in the distance, a view that Friedrich painted in 
and exhibited in Berlin in  (illus. ). Ahlborn’s mélange reads curi-
ously as a blueprint of Ramdohr’s imagined alternative to Cross in the
Mountains: devotion to religious symbols in a real landscape aided by an
enframing sacral architecture.


   

Ramdohr’s alternative altar-window, Ahlborn’s anecdotal Cloister

Cemetery with the Watzmann, and Cross in the Mountains itself all evoke a
relation between Christian worship and nature feeling prefigured by
Friedrich’s spiritual precursor in Pomerania, Ludwig Kosegarten. In his
shore-sermons, we recall, Kosegarten celebrated mass outdoors, invoking
the whole of landscape as, in his admirer Joseph von Görres’s term,
‘symbol, prayer, and divine service’. In , Kosegarten planned a simple
chapel for the fishing village of Vitte in Rügen, where in bad weather he
could deliver his sermons, no doubt to the great relief of his fishermen
parishioners. Along with Philipp Otto Runge, Friedrich competed for the
opportunity to execute its altarpiece; and although the commission was
foiled by the Napoleonic wars, Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains repre-
sents one fruit of Kosegarten’s plan. An architectural drawing testifies to
the artist’s further involvement in the Vitte project. Friedrich’s sketch,
dated – and kept now in Nuremberg, represents the ground-plan
for a chapel whose oval shape and general arrangement repeats a large,
elliptical grove of trees and boulders at the chapel’s entrance (illus. ).
Chapel and grove, alternative settings for Kosegarten’s ministry, inscribe
landscape into a sacred architecture while also submitting the chapel,
altar and congregation to the order of nature. Friedrich’s various scenes
of ruined cloisters in the wilderness reiterate this principle (illus.  and
). In the large canvas of a Cloister Cemetery in the Snow, formerly in
Berlin but destroyed by aerial bombing in , the barren oaks encircle
the central ruin rather like the oval grove of trees indicated around the
outdoor altar in Friedrich’s Nuremberg ground-plan. By echoing the
standing remnants of the cloister, the vertical forms of the oak trees open
up the church, and with it the mass celebrated within, to surrounding
nature. A similar principle is at work in Friedrich’s sepia Pilgrimage at
Sunrise, first exhibited in Weimar in  (illus. 6). While the rite is cel-
ebrated outdoors, without any hint of church or ruins, the ordering
power of nature and of Friedrich’s art construct a sacred architecture:
the trees at the left function like a church portal; the sun rises directly
behind a priest bearing a monstrance, which places the landscape into
an appropriate allegory of resurrection; and the field cross, flanked by
bushes, stands near the centre of the sheet, as if to link the order of rep-
resentation to the order of the icon. Here, as in so many of Friedrich’s
images, the scene’s axial symmetry inscribes the landscape’s architecture
into the geometry of the canvas, giving the image itself the character of
an altarpiece.


   

 Ground-plan of
an Oval Space,
?–.
Germanisches
Nationalmuseum,
Nuremberg.

Motivating all these expansions, all these dissolutions of boundary and

distinction, lies the desire for immediacy. In terms of a Protestant theo-
logy shared by Friedrich and Kosegarten, this desire might be expressed
as a critique of the church as necessary intercessor between the individual
and God. Martin Luther, in his St Stephen’s Day Epistle of , wrote
that ‘it would be better to uproot all the churches and monasteries of the
world and burn them to dust’, for it does not matter where one prays or
sermonizes, ‘whether in a house or in the market’. And elsewhere he
writes, ‘the house of God means where He dwells, and He dwells where
his Word is, whether it be in the fields, or in the churches, or on the sea.’
In the -year later Cross in the Mountains, however, the desire has a dif-
ferent locus and inflection, seeking not only an immediacy of religious
experience, but also an unmediated experience per se. To put it simply:
does Friedrich’s landscape simply reanimate, by way of the modern cult


   

 Cloister Cemetery in the Snow, –. Destroyed, formerly in the

National Gallery, Berlin.

of nature, the sacred instrument of the altarpiece? Or are the vestiges of

cathedral and altar, invoked as frames, windows or symmetries, rather a
strategy for intensifying the impact of art, for rendering immediate, on
the model of sacred architecture and icon, the referential relation between
image and meaning, representation and experience?
It will be impossible to adjudicate between these two functions. Not
because we lack evidence for Friedrich’s motives, but because the very
terms of the opposition religion/art are destabilized by Romanticism’s
project, which we here call ‘art as religion’. Again, the more programmat-
ic work of Runge can offer historical orientation. Earlier we discussed
Runge’s vision of a new form of art called ‘landscape’ that would replace
traditional history painting with more abstract figurations suitable to a
new epoch. Motivating this succession of genres is not simply a desire for
originality in art, but also the present age’s radical difference from the
past, which Runge rewrites as a history of the decline of religions:

The Greeks achieved the highest beauty in forms and figures at the
moment when their gods were dying; the new Romans [i.e. Raphael
and Michelangelo] went furthest in the development of historical


   

 Pilgrimage at Sunrise, c. . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Weimar.

painting at the time when the Catholic religion was perishing; with
us too something again is dying: we stand on the brink of all the
religions that originated with Catholicism; the abstractions are fad-
ing away; everything becomes more airy and lighter than before;
everything draws towards landscape, seeks something definite in
this indeterminacy, and does not know where to begin?

The question mark closing Runge’s giant sentence signals the open-ended
and therefore properly projective character of his history. It situates land-
scape between belatedness, experienced as the inadequacy of an old era
yet to be superseded, and untimeliness, in which the new is known only
through negation or abstraction: as the past that it shall not still be. In
the small Morning, Runge dramatizes the dawn of landscape itself by
transuming the faded religions. Striding from the horizon, the embodi-
ment of the Greek ideal of female beauty, Venus, is fused with Raphael’s
Christian Virgin and Guido’s Baroque Aurora to illuminate the birth of a
‘landscape’ that is indeed airier in its form and its referentiality, which is
to say, less translatable into the old myths and figures (illus. ). In Runge’s
stated project, however, even such a sublimation is only the initial step


   

towards true landscape, which will ultimately do away with all human
forms, all creative and symbolic flowers, and indeed the whole artificial
enframing cosmogony, to become an abstract but somehow perfectly legi-
ble configuration of colour. Runge’s hyperbole of art historical origination,
written about the now lost painting of Mother at the Source, can be applied
here as well. The two works were both meant as ‘a source in the broadest
sense of the word; also the source of all pictures which I will ever make,
the foundation of the new art which I have in mind, also a spring in and
by itself ’.
Runge’s art can also trace a different trajectory, one which recuperates
the old myths and figures within a new landscape, in a manner akin to
Friedrich resacralization of a common summit crucifix in Cross in the
Mountains. In the unfinished canvas Rest on the Flight into Egypt, dating
from – and possibly proposed for the altar of the Marienkirche in
Greifswald, Runge again represents a morning scene, but takes as his
subject a traditional Christian motif (illus. ). Even the integration of
Joseph, the Virgin Mary and the Christ-child into their natural surround-
ings has precedents in earlier religious art. Since the sixteenth-century artist
Lucas Cranach the Elder, the scene of the Rest functioned in German
painting as an occasion for depicting exotic and flourishing landscapes.
Runge’s canvas, however, does not quite introduce the sacred figures into
a natural setting, but rather reads them directly out of nature, a process
which can be observed, as if in laboratory conditions, in the extraordinary
drawing Nile Valley Landscape also dated – (illus. ). This sketch,
which the artist seems to have sent to Goethe in April , is not a proper
‘preparatory’ design. Runge had already worked out the figural group

 Philipp Otto
Runge, Rest on the
Flight into Egypt,
–. Kunst-
halle, Hamburg.


   

 Philipp Otto
Runge, Nile Valley
Landscape, –.
Kunsthalle,
Hamburg.

and landscape setting of Rest in an earlier project drawing, now preserved

in Hamburg. And rather than detailing the background for the finished
canvas, Nile Valley proposes an alternative vision, transforming the figures
of sacred legend into objects of nature. Thus the silhouette of Joseph and
the ass becomes the twisted form of a tree trunk, with Joseph’s shoulder
converted to the upper part of a root and his long staff metamorphosed to
the lower part; the Virgin draped in her shawl is changed into a bank of
earth, while the Christ-child becomes a grassy mound; and the putti in the
tulip tree simply vanish, leaving behind a rather ordinary landscape,
except perhaps for the strange columned structure and pyramid beyond,
indicating ‘Egypt’.
Runge stages this transformation within a fiction of artistic origina-
tion, that is, the genesis of history painting from nature drawing, only to
overturn its temporality and therefore its implicit hierarchy. The mute
forms of the sketched landscape become potential players in a sacred
drama, symbols of a yet unknown myth or cult; while the personages of
the Christian story become naturalized, rather like spirits of the place, or
like those more abstract figurations that emerge from, and are consubstan-
tial with, the amaryllises of the small Morning. One possible undersong of
this reversibility of history and landscape, finished painting and project
drawing, figure and ground, is the expression of a genius loci: the Nile delta
as fecund source at once of nature and of myth and religion. Like such
Romantic philosophers of myth as his close associate Joseph von Görres,
Schelling and Friedrich Creuzer, Runge was fascinated with beliefs older
than the Christian faith. In Nile Valley he imagines the reversal of the


   

Christian religon’s ‘historical’ emergence from Near Eastern nature cults.

‘Everything draws towards landscape’, for nature harbours the concealed
forms of erstwhile and future figuration.
In Rest and Nile Valley, an Ovidian myth of metamorphosis, where
legends become places, articulates the metamorphosis of myth itself, with
the result that the naturalized figures of religion become equivalent to the
symbolic potential of landscape. Such multiple determination is
Romantic art’s semantic ideal. We can observe its operation in a passage
in German literature of the period that stands very close to Friedrich’s
Cross in the Mountains. In his  novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen,
set in the epoch of Albrecht Dürer, Ludwig Tieck describes a painting of
a crucifix in the wilderness in order to theorize the signifying relation
between art, nature and religion. The passage occurs at a crucial moment
in the novel, when the hero Sternbald, an aspiring German painter trav-
elling as a journeyman through Italy, visits an old artist living in the
mountains as a hermit. Motivating the visit is a certain waning of the
hero’s ‘enthusiasm’, an artistic crisis, that is, which takes the characteris-
tically Romantic form of alternating feelings of solipsism and engulfment
by nature. At one moment Sternbald proclaims. ‘Not these plants, not
these mountains do I want to copy; rather, I want to portray my feeling,
my mood, which moves me in this moment.’ A moment later he laments,
‘Oh powerless art! How stammering and childlike are your sounds com-
pared with the full, harmonious organ music which springs forth from
mountain and valley and forest and sparkling river in swelling, rising
chords.’ Interpreting and, to a degree, resolving this agon between nature
and consciousness, the hermit-painter’s life and art stand as pedagogy for
Sternbald. The lesson climaxes in the description of a canvas made by the
hermit, in which a pilgrim wanders through a moonlit landscape: ‘On a
hill high above, a crucifix shines from afar, the clouds dividing around it.
A rain of rays from the moon pours forth and plays about the holy sign.’
As in Friedrich’s description of the originary experience for Cross in the
Mountains, Tieck’s description, too, is followed immediately by exegesis.
The hermit reads his own painting as an emblem of the relation between
earthly existence and heavenly promise, interpreting the pilgrim as
Everyman, his path as ‘life’, the picture’s darkness as the fallenness of our
vision and the moonlight as God’s love incarnated in Christ.
Familiar to us is also the painting’s mode of signification, although Tieck
employs a more finely tuned terminology than Friedrich or Ramdohr. The
hermit calls the crucifix a ‘Fingerzeig’, meaning literally a ‘pointing finger’.


   

Pointers are signs with very particular expressive features. They are shifters,
for they refer not to a signified which they themselves convey, but to another
object or expression temporally or spatially nearby. The deictic ‘this’, an ob-
vious verbal equivalent to the Fingerzeig, will point to a contiguous entity
or utterance, as when replying to the question ‘which painting do you mean?’,
one points one’s finger towards a canvas and says, ‘this one’. Yet as Umberto
Eco has argued, ‘this’ can also denote ‘closeness of the speaker’ even if neither
the object nor the utterance pointed out is at hand. ‘/This/’, writes Eco,
‘does not acquire a meaning because something is close to it; on the contrary
it signifies that there must be something close to it.’ That the pointing finger
might, or indeed might always, gesture towards an absence, is a possibility
imagined long before the modern discipline of semiotics. It is the central
theme of Hegel’s famous discussion of the failure of the deictic ‘here’ and
‘now’ which opens the Phenomenology of the Spirit (). For our purposes,
the semantics of Tieck’s Fingerzeig is useful, both because it elucidates
the signifying structure of what Tieck and the Romantics will term ‘al-
legory’, and because the insistence that what is represented is always this tree,
this alder thicket, this cross in these mountains, is so central a gesture in
Friedrich’s own landscape.
How and to what does the hermit-painter’s summit cross point? Unlike
the religious icon, it does not refer to the person of Christ represented in
effigy nor to the historical moment of His Crucifixion. Nor does it fulfil
itself by infusing the landscape with a vague religious sentiment, as in the
 drawing Prebischkegel in Saxon Switzerland by Friedrich’s precursor
in Dresden, Adrian Zingg (illus. ). Rather, Tieck’s cross, pointing
upward into the heavens, discovers there neither its own spiritual meaning
nor even quite its natural equivalent, but rather only the absence or con-
cealment of meaning. ‘I put down here a gentle riddle,’ explains the hermit,
‘which not everyone can solve, but which is still easier to guess than that
sublimity that nature wraps around itself as cover.’ As in Friedrich’s
secret within a secret, Tieck’s Fingerzeig stands for the endless deferment
of sense, the sheer movement ‘beyond’ that uncovers at its destination
only another indication of transcendence. Sternbald names the hermit’s
signifying code: ‘“One could . . . call this painting allegorical.”’ The
hermit agrees:

All art is allegorical, as you take it. What can man represent, singu-
lar and standing for itself, cut off and eternal distinct from the rest
of the world, like the objects before us as we see them? Art also


   

 Adrian Zingg, Prebischkegel in Saxon Switzerland, c. .

Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

ought not to do so: we knit together, we seek to fix to the particular

a general meaning, and thus arises allegory.

Allegory occurs because art is not nature, because its objects are not
autochthonous and self-contained, and because fallen man cannot deci-
pher the book of nature. The reference of allegory, the target of the
Fingerzeig, therefore cannot be another object or utterance, clear and dif-
ferentiated from other entities, for what it indicates is the human condi-
tion, articulated as the inadequacy of signs and the failure of deixis, or, in
the case of Tieck and Friedrich, as the abyss between this world and the
next, and between the aesthetic and the religious. The hermit teaches
Sternbald that self and world are separated by a gap which allegory can-
not span, but can only signify as gap. And he instructs us that crucifix,
painted landscape and even our own verbal exegesis will no longer settle
which meaning is meant, but will only intimate that some meaning might
be, as it were, close by.
The influence of Tieck on Friedrich was recognized by the artist’s con-
temporaries; and it was remembered as late as , when Franz Reber, in
his important History of Modern German Painting, quotes a passage from


   

Sternbald to explain what Reber calls the ‘spiritual rapport between nature
and beholder’ dramatized in Friedrich’s paintings. Already when Ramdohr,
who had been mocked in Wackenroder and Tieck’s Herzensergeissungen of
, terms Cross in the Mountains an ‘allegory’, he may well have regis-
tered the link between Friedrich’s landscape and the fictive canvas of
Sternbald’s hermit-painter. Goethe, too, located Friedrich within the
orbit of Tieckian aesthetics when in  he criticized the painter as one
of the ‘cloister brother’s companions’. What specifically disturbed the
-year-old about this new and young Romantic brotherhood was the
artificiality of its art, as well as its tendency to conceive of current content
as somehow separable from form. Against ‘allegorical’ expressions which
are only externally significant, Goethe set the vision of a ‘fitting unity of
the spiritual meaning and sensual evocation’ wherein ‘true art celebrates
its triumph’.
In the period of Friedrich’s early development as an artist, the ideal of
an expression that is inwardly and essentially significant, as the perfect
coincidence between the sensible and the non-sensible, being and mean-
ing, the real and the ideal, received the name ‘symbol’. Its antithesis was
‘allegory’, in which meaning remains distinct from expression, residing
always elsewhere and never fully constituted by the sign itself, hence the
word’s prefix allos, meaning ‘other’. As Gadamer has written in his chron-
icle of the philosophical origins of this distinction, ‘symbol and allegory
are opposed as art is opposed to non-art, in that the former appears end-
lessly suggestive in the indefiniteness of its meaning, whereas the latter, as
soon as its meaning is reached, has run its full course’. Tieck, I would
note, complicates such a distinction by proposing that allegory,
Romantically construed, never fully ‘runs its course’. Yet this deferment
of meaning itself, this restless pointing beyond sets allegory apart from
the symbol’s dream of immanence. Where, though, do Friedrich’s paint-
ings stand in relation to this distinction on which virtually the whole of
Romantic sign theory rests?
The implications of Goethe’s vision for the aesthetics of landscape are
most fully developed in Carl Gustav Carus’s Nine Letters on Landscape
Painting, published in  but composed between  and . Carus
was, among other things, a talented amateur painter who received informal
training from Friedrich, beginning in ; and in the first three of his
Letters, Carus simply articulates his teacher’s views on art, nature and
beauty. After , however, Carus was increasingly influenced by Goethe,
to whom the Letters were finally dedicated. In Letter , Carus sets his ideal


   

against a category of landscape he calls ‘sentimental’, in which ‘nature is

regarded only as symbol, as hieroglyph, and one believes that one has done
enough when the object is rendered recognizable to the extent merely that
its symbolic meaning can be grasped’. Carus takes as his example the paint-
ing of the cross in a moonlit landscape described in Sternbald, but he may
also, via Tieck, be criticizing the art of his friend and mentor Friedrich.
His dispute is not with the specific content evoked by the hermit’s paint-
ing, which he sees as an admirable ‘Christian-moral idea’, but rather with
the painting’s manner of evocation. Through its overtly allegorical func-
tion, landscape has become primarily the designation of something else,
while art’s proper end ought to be simply the expression in and of itself. A
landscape with a cross, Carus argues, must be fully significant even to some-
one ignorant of the Christian faith and its hieroglyphs. It must embody its
message in the forms of nature alone, which speak directly to all people,
‘for it is henceforth demanded that the individual, in such a case, finds
himself transported as if into a prospect of nature [Naturbeschauungl, a
prospect which can appear in every sense as always beautiful, no matter who
the viewer is; so that no one else’s view infringes upon a person’s vision of
nature, and he retains the individual freedom of his opinion [Ansicht]’.
Against allegory, which forces an instantaneous passage from the signifier
to the intended signified, and from the particularity of the landscape to the
generality of its moral sense, Carus sets an art which values the appearance
of the individual sign itself, and which valorizes our independent contem-
plation of this opacity, this intransitivity of the signified, as precisely an
instance of our own moral autonomy as free subjects. Where allegory signals
a meaning beyond itself, true art is what it means. Within a complex intel-
lectual itinerary leading from Kant’s analysis of the symbol in the Critique
of Judgment, through Goethe and Karl-Philippe Moritz, to the Romantics,
Schelling, Carus, Creuzer, K.W.F. Solger and Wilhelm von Humboldt, this
semantic tautology (or tautegory, as Schelling calls it) comes to be termed
the symbol.
In Carus’s description, the advent of the symbol proper occurs specifi-
cally when a landscape painting no longer stands as arbitrary sign for
meanings which it itself does not constitute, but instead confronts the
viewer directly, ‘as if in a prospect of nature’. This erasure of the bound-
ary between nature and art, and between experience and the representation
of experience (a boundary upon which Ramdohr’s critique of the meaning
and function of Cross in the Mountains was founded) is foundational to the
new metaphysics of the symbol. In his chapter, ‘The Subjectivisation of


   

Aesthetics’ in Truth and Method (), Gadamer demonstrates that the

valorization of symbol at the expense of allegory coincides with the emer-
gence of Erlebniskunst as the aesthetic norm. If art is imagined as having its
source and its end in experience, rather than in, say, religious dogma or
moral persuasion, then the unity to which an individual work refers is not a
constantive meaning, nor even quite a plurality of meanings, but rather the
human subject from whose experience the work issued forth. The lauded
inexhaustibility of the symbol’s reference follows partly from the infinity
of this singular source in artistic genius, which transforms individual
experience into a universal truth, and partly from the free expansiveness of
the viewer’s own subjective response. Gadamer traces this modern concep-
tion of the artwork back to the semiotics of religion. Where allegory arose
from the need to posit valid truths ‘behind’ seemingly arbitrary or undesir-
able representations, the symbol assumes some participation of the sensible
in the divine, the signum in the res:

[T]he symbol is not a random choice or founding of a sign, but

presupposes a metaphysical connection between the visible and the
invisible. The inseparability of visible appearance and invisible
meaning, this coincidence of two spheres, lies at the base of all forms
of religious cult.

This theological foundation of the Romantic symbol is exposed in

Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains. By fashioning the Sternbaldian Cross-
landscape as a working altarpiece, and by investing the forms of nature with
the message of the Eucharist through the agency of the work’s carved
frame, Friedrich makes explicit, and therefore reanimates, the historical link
between religious and aesthetic signs. The enframing allegory discovers the
properly symbolic dimension of Cross in the Mountains.
It is thus very difficult to place Friedrich’s landscapes within Carus’s
opposition between his own Goethean naturalism and what he terms
Tieck’s sentimentalism, or between a symbolic and an allegorical art. Even
Carus betrays how slippery such oppositions still are in  when he terms
Tieck’s landscape a ‘symbol’ and a ‘hieroglyph’. And in Sternbald itself
the distinctions are anything but clear. Just a few pages before the hermit
episode, the hero of Tieck’s novel exclaims, ‘the loftiest art can only
explain itself; it is the song whose content can only be itself.’ This ideal of
the coincidence of artwork and commentary, form and content, belongs to
the classic definition of the symbol as intransitive and autotelic, as against


   

the transitivity and heterotelism of allegory. And even the referent of the
hermit-painter’s designated ‘allegory’ is anything but exhaustible through
Christian exegesis, being, as we have seen, the site of an infinite prolifer-
ation of meaning. Reading Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains through the
period terms ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’ will therefore not decide whether the
landscape is what it means, or whether it stands as a vehicle for some
other meaning – religious, political or private – to be decoded. Much
recent literature on the artist remains stalled in its various decisions as to
the subject of his landscape. Some historians invest every natural object in
Friedrich’s paintings with esoteric meaning, so that foreground rocks
become emblems of faith, misty backgrounds the signs of Paradise, oaks
the markers of a pagan past, etc. More recent commentators have rightly
rejected such a procedure of translation, asserting that Friedrich allows
nature to speak directly to the viewer, without any intervening allegory.
Thus in Cross in the Mountains, the summit and fir trees (which of course
are Weihnachtsbäume or ‘Christmas trees’), along with the numerous pyr-
amids of clouds and light, are natural triangles, and therefore already
potential symbols for Christ even outside of their idealization in the pre-
della’s Trinity emblem. From this perspective the crucifix itself, composed
of a vertical crossed with a horizontal, has always uncannily embodied the
intersection of heaven and earth, God and man. If the movement from
frame to landscape involves a naturalization of the symbol, it also discov-
ers the already symbolic character of nature, which is perhaps why
Friedrich crowned his ensemble with the canopy of palm leaves and putti
as emblems of infinity, as if to suggest not only the traditional proclama-
tion of eternal life, but also a Romantic et cetera promising the symbol’s
continued expansion into our world.
But in certain instances in his œuvre, and even strikingly in passages in
his writings, Friedrich himself submits landscape to an allegorization that
looks more Baroque than Romantic. As Paul de Man argued for Romantic
literature in his  essay ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, we ought to see
symbol and allegory not as an opposition of two kinds of art, nor as art to
non-art, but as constitutive moments of Erlebniskunst. The symbol’s
unmediated vision, its coincidence between image and substance, may be an
aesthetic ideal, yet the story that Friedrich tells is also of the tragic failure
of any such perfect reciprocity, and the mode of his telling is the renaissance
of allegory constituted by his art.


 8
The End of Iconography

Thus it should neither surprise nor disappoint us when Friedrich

defends himself against Ramdohr by writing for his ensemble an explan-
atory allegory. Friedrich’s apologia originated as a letter of  February
, addressed to ‘Prof. Schulz’ in Weimar. Recent research has identi-
fied the recipient as Johannes Karl Hartwig Schultze, who was a notable
theologian and disciple of Schleiermacher, as well as a distinguished art
historian in Winckelmann’s tradition. Presumably Friedrich hoped that with
his classicist taste and Romantic piety, Schultze might both be sympathetic
to Cross in the Mountains and support the artist usefully against Ramdohr’s
various invectives. And Schultze gave Friedrich’s letter to the editor of
Journal of Luxury and Fashion, who at once published an abridgement of
it as part of Christian August Semler’s essay on Cross in the Mountains.
This ‘interpretation of the picture’, as it is labelled in the review, runs
as follows:

Jesus Christ, nailed to the Cross, is turned here towards the setting
sun as image of the eternal all-animating Father. With Jesus the old
world died, in which God the Father walked upon the earth
unmediated. This sun set, and the earth could no longer apprehend
the departing light. There shines forth in the gold of the sunset the
purest, noblest metal of the Saviour’s figure on the Cross, which
thus reflects on earth in a tempered glow. The Cross stands erected
on a rock, firm and immovable, like our faith in Jesus Christ.
Evergreen through all times stand the firs around the Cross, like the
hope of people in Him, the Crucified.

The plot of Friedrich’s exegesis is familiar to us from Ramdohr and

Tieck. The sun stands for God; its concealment enacts our loss of an
unmediated vision of the divine; the rays of light on the sky, and the
reflections on the gilt crucifix, represent mediated epiphanies; and the
landscape’s whole signifying structure is analogized to the Christian


    

image of mediation par excellence, the God-man dying on the cross for our
sins. Additionally, the artist particularizes the tenor of his scene, match-
ing each visible element of landscape with a notional message: the ever-
green firs and ivy signal Hope, and the rock Faith, and elsewhere in
Friedrich’s account, the purple sky emblematizes Christ’s Passion. This
insistence on hermeneutic closure is, of course, partly a response to what
Friedrich perceives are Ramdohr’s inaccuracies. Yet threatened by a false
or travestying reception, the artist offers his public an interpretive key
which, in stabilizing meaning, also compromises Romantic art’s impulse
towards exegetical uncertainty and creative misprision.
In his lectures on the philosophy of art, delivered in Jena in the winter
of –, F.W.J. Schelling proposed that in allegory ‘the particular merely
means or signifies the universal’, while in the symbolic forms of mythology
and of art, the particular ‘is simultaneously also the universal’. For this
reason ‘all symbolism is easy to allegorize’, because the particular stands
always present in, even though never exhaustive of, the symbol.
Friedrich’s published clavis clearly avails itself of this possibility, discern-
ing a level of particularized sense always potential in the work of art.
Sometimes the movement from symbol to allegory occurs within the
artist’s landscapes themselves, as when the natural worlds of Landscape
with Oaks (illus. ) and Winter Landscape (illus. ) give way, through a con-
nective plot, to the quasi-visionary Winter Landscape with Church (illus. ).
In Morning in the Riesengebirge (illus. ), produced in the year or so fol-
lowing the Cross in the Mountains and thus in the midst of controversy,
Friedrich might have intended a shift to allegory to answer his detractors’
objections. Our perspective of the mountain scene has expanded to include
a strip of foreground rocks and a vast background of peaks layered to-
wards the horizon; and the sharp contrast between a darkened summit
and an uncanny, glowing sky, criticized bv Ramdohr in the  ensemble,
has given way to a more variegated diffusion of light and colour. More
importantly, the mountain’s cross is now attended by figural staffage. A
woman in a white gown embraces the crucifix while helping a wanderer
ascend the summit rock. These personages, thought to be painted with
the assistance of Friedrich’s friend Georg Friedrich Kersting, supply
what was felt to be missing from Cross in the Mountains. The woman,
clearly no ordinary mountaineer, belongs to the realm of allegory, and
whether she personifies faith, hope or religion, her semantic function is
essentially to signal within the landscape, and therefore without the inter-
vention of an allegorical frame, the mere presence of occulted meaning


   

per se. And the wanderer, bearing the features of Friedrich himself, makes
explicit the implied point of reference of Cross in the Mountains: the
artist’s individual experience of nature.
Yet while thus externalizing the new claims of Erlebniskunst, while
emplotting the picture as the event of the artist’s ascent to the cross via
landscape and allegory, the staffage of Morning in the Riesengebirge acts also
to return Friedrich’s art to a more traditional mode of reference, one in
which we are witness to, but not direct participants in, a relation between
self and world. A similar process is at work in a small gouache copy of
Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains, executed by Joseph von Führich in ,
probably during his visit to the Tetschen Castle in Bohemia (illus. ). By
adding to the composition a praying hermit-pilgrim upon a mountain
path (surely a reference to Tieck’s fictive painting in Sternbald), Führich
cancels the ambivalence, celebrated in Friedrich’s ensemble, between land-
scape and altarpiece, mere nature and divine symbol. Like the shepherdess
of Zingg’s Prebischkegel (illus. ), the pilgrim belongs to the ambience of
the landscape he inhabits, and through his presence the scene turns away
from us, becoming a restricted sentimental anecdote which we view from
without. Such closure was enacted also in Friedrich’s own written allego-
rization of Cross in the Mountains, however, in which the meaning of the
picture, if not quite our experience of it, aspires to stand already solved
before us.
To what extent does Friedrich’s apologia solve the problems of mean-
ing and function raised by Ramdohr? While similar to Tieck’s allegory in
its overall exegetical procedure, its translation of each landscape element
into a mediation between man and God, earth and heaven, Friedrich’s
commentary additionally accounts for how and when things got this way.
The artist reads Cross in the Mountains as the allegory of a temporal crisis.
The setting sun emblematizes not only the state of God’s absence from
the world, but also the event of His disappearance, which occurs simulta-
neously as the historical moment of Christ’s death, when the Law gave
way to the Gospel, and as the natural occurrence of night taking place in
the here and now of a German mountain landscape. In Friedrich’s origi-
nal letter to Schultze, the dying ‘old world’ is explicitly the era of the Old
Testament, when ‘God the Father spoke to Cain . . . and to Abraham’.
From this perspective, Cross in the Mountains stands in a tradition of reli-
gious art reaching back through the Reformation to the very foundations
of Christian iconography, in which figures of the new faith emerged
paired with, and therefore legitimized by, subsumed figures of the old:


    

 Joseph von Führich,

Cross in the Mountains,
. Private collection,
Munich.

Christ with Adam, John the Baptist with Moses, the Crucifix with the
Tree of Knowledge, Mary with Eve. In Lucas Cranach’s single-sheet
woodcut of the Law and the Gospel from around , for example, the
events of Christ’s life (Annunciation, Crucifixion, Resurrection), repre-
sented at the right, are paired antithetically with the circumstances of man
under the Law (the Fall, death and damnation) at the left (illus. ). At
one level, the picture argues that Christ overturns the Law by fulfilling it,
and in the pictorial symmetry that embodies this idea of divine answer or
solution, Cranach suggests the directness of reference, or ideal of reci-
procity, between signifier and signified, figure and type, instantiated in the
Gospel’s events, message and very mode of signification. At another level,
Cranach’s woodcut, produced in collaboration with Martin Luther, also
expresses another temporal crisis: the demise of the era of the Church and
papacy, that Luther characterized by their false adherence to the Law, and
the advent of the new evangelical faith of Protestantism, emergent at the
moment of the production of the print.


   

 Lucas Cranach
the Elder, The Law
and the Gospels,
c. .

Cross in the Mountains was produced in an analogous moment of his-

torical rupture, on the eve of the Napoleonic wars and in the midst of a
reformation of the Protestant piety, through both the ‘Renaissance of the
North’ and Schleiermacher. Friedrich visualizes his epoch’s crisis very
differently from Cranach, however. Instead of placing old and new side by
side before the viewer, as if they were choices separated by the bare and
leafy tree at the picture’s centre (part of the traditional iconography of
Hercules at the Crossroads), Friedrich positions the end of the world at
the far side of his landscape, in the sunset at the horizon, and he conceals
from us its passing through the covering summit and cross. It could be
supposed from our symmetry with the sun that we stand at the end of an
era whose advent was Christ; and our belatedness, which in a moment
shall be literally benightedness, is expressed in the reversed position of
His effigy. Christ is no longer even quite present to us as image.
Within the logic of Friedrich’s allegory, and outside any analysis of
the painter’s personal faith, Cross in the Mountains stands at the brink of a
night that signifies the disappearance of God. The darkness engulfing us
could be the dwelling place of a god exited by the sun of the Enlighten-
ment, which is how Novalis reads the sunset in his Hymns of the Night.
There the twilight of a dying world rediscovers in the now visible stars
the gods of an even older world. Yet in Friedrich, the crucifix’s reflected
shine is quintessentially a mediated light, and it too will vanish soon, which
compels some commentators to regard the picture as expressing a radical
atheism. As Donat de Chapeaurouge reminded us, there was a place for
such a position within the culture of Romanticism. Jean Paul, for example,
in his wilfully eclectic three-volume novel Flower, Fruit, or Thorn Pieces


    

(), tells a tale of the dead Christ in search of God. Returning from his
wanderings about the cosmos, Christ, ‘with an everlasting pain’, seats
himself upon an ‘altar’ and informs the shades of the dead that there is
no God:

I descended down as far as being still casts its shadow, and I gazed
into the abyss and cried, ‘Father, where are you?’ But I heard only
the eternal storm, to which no one responded; and the shimmering
rainbow of beings stood over the abyss, trickling down without the
sun that created it. And as I looked upward to the immeasurable
void, seeking a divine eye, the world stared back at me with an
empty, bottomless eye socket; and eternity lay upon chaos and
gnawed at it, ruminating upon itself. Scream forth, you discords,
cry apart the shadows, for He is not!

In Jean Paul’s vision of the altarpiece, Christ in his aspect as Man of

Sorrows or Schmerzensmann appears as if in some Anti-Mass of St Gregory,
preaching that God is dead, that man is alone in the universe, and that He,
Christ, too shall not transcend His Passion. Friedrich too stations his
effigy of Christ over an abyss, as witness to the disappearance of God the
father. Yet the altarpiece’s frame, allegorizing the forms of nature, still can
discover God’s all-seeing eye, as well as the sun, guaranteeing the rainbow
of the Covenant (emblematized below by the wheat and vine arch, and
above by the palm branches and putti). Perhaps, then, landscape only
expresses the Lutheran notion of deus absconditus, God hidden from the
fallen world. And therefore Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains can indeed
still be an altarpiece, though with an appropriately limited function. His
back turned towards us, and as a mere gilt effigy within a painted scene,
an image twice removed, Christ too demonstrates in his presence and
absence our infinite distance from the divine, eliciting from us a faith which
is at most a longing.
Even so, can Friedrich’s self-fashioned allegory and the recuperated
history of his Romantic religion, ever decide the message of such an altar?
Or, to paraphrase Ramdohr’s question on the function of Cross in the
Mountains, can landscape, proclaimed by the Romantics as the genre that
replaces religious history when the old religions die, ‘invite the pious man
to devotion’?


   

In a letter of  to his brother Daniel, Philipp Otto Runge expresses a

sense of combined belatedness and expectation felt by the whole culture
of German Romanticism: ‘Are we at it again, carrying an epoch to its
grave?’ Cross in the Mountains and indeed all Friedrich’s landscapes that
hover in the twilight between day and night, visibility and invisibility, and
summer and winter, allegorize an authentically temporal predicament,
allowing it to be expressed variously at the levels of nature, human histo-
ry, the history of art, the life of the individual and the moment of our own
experience of the work of art. Thus, for example, the mountain sunset
becomes at once the transitus from the Law to the Gospels, the demise of
Enlightenment through Romanticism, the death of the altarpiece and the
birth of true landscape painting, and the end of iconography and the
beginning of a new, inexhaustible symbolicity. The specific direction of
the movement matters little: whether, say, the shift is a decline from a
prior fullness to an impoverished present, as when Friedrich in his writ-
ings allegorizes a scene of ‘rotting cult images, destroyed altars, and bro-
ken fonts’ as the ‘ruined totality of another era’ and as the ‘collapse of the
epoch of the Temple’s majesty’; or whether instead the landscape evi-
dences a future restoration. What is vital and characteristic of Friedrich’s
art is simply that there be transition, and therefore that the fullness of the
Romantic symbol, whether as lost past or utopian destiny, is never an
achieved aesthetic, but only one moment in an allegory whose theme and
whose medium is time.
Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of History that ‘fine art arose within the
church itself . . . although art has already left the principle of the church’.
This familiar thesis of art as a secularized religion is a foundation of the
historiography of painting as it developed in the discipline of art history
since Romanticism. It is in Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains that it first
appears self-consciously incarnated as art. According to Hegel, the image
shall function henceforth not primarily for devotion, but rather for the
‘aesthetic experience’. Perhaps this is why Friedrich replaces the cult object
with an emblem of Erlebniskunst, Christ turned to behold a landscape whose
fullness we cannot see; the modern Man of Sorrows as surrogate viewer;
the mythic intercessor between God and man as the aesthetic mediation
between nature and consciousness. When we have understood this curious
conceit of a vision of Christ as Rückenfigur viewing the landscape that shall
replace His altars, we shall have come a long way in discerning Friedrich’s
place in the history of art.


  
The Halted Traveller

‘And I will take away mine hand,

and thou shalt see my back parts:
but my face shall not be seen.’
Exodus : 

‘Wer hat uns also umgedreht, dass wir,

was wir auch tun, in jener Haltung sind
von einem welcher fortgeht?’
Who has turned us round like this so that we,
whatever we do, have the bearing of
someone who’s going away?
Rilke
 Early Snow, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Chasseur in the Forest, –. Private collection, Bielefeld.


 Neubrandenburg, c. . Stiftung Pommern, Kiel.


 Woman at the Window, . National Gallery, Berlin.


 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Morning Fog in the Mountains, c. . Staatliche Museen Schloss
Heidecksburg, Rudolstadt.


 Clouds over the Riesengebirge, c. –. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Mountain Landscape, . Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.


 9

Entering the Wood

A path leads into the wood before me (illus. ). I trace it with my eye: a
white painted surface that rises vertically from the bottom of the canvas,
but which, as I cling to it with my gaze, stretches forth as a horizontal
path. I see into the canvas as if into a wood; my eye goes forth into this
picture of an entrance as a stone would fall to earth. Entering the wood,
my eye can trace many paths. Straight ahead, bare tree trunks give way to
darkness. The wood I enter there appears like woodwork, or better, mock
woodwork, like the false surface of a trompe-l’oeil. When the forest’s dis-
tance thus flattens into the canvas’s plane, depth and the illusion of
entrance vanishes. If I raise my eyes higher, however, above the trees, my
gaze can expand. The sky, a little patch of blue, invokes a vast space
beyond the picture’s narrow horizons. Lowering my gaze, I can enter the
wood, now confident of passage under the sky.
The path turns to the right and I follow it, yet it is a phantom path
beyond what the painted image offers. To follow it is to trust myself to a
‘blind path’, yet it is precisely at this turn into blindness that Friedrich sit-
uates us in Early Snow. We know of such passages in real forests, roads that
seem to lead somewhere but end in the unnavigable. These paths are para-
doxes, since their existence means that someone was already there, yet their
abrupt endings make us wonder where their first travellers have gone. In
German such a path is called a Holzweg, which means both timber track
and, figuratively, wrong track, as in being utterly at fault. Martin Heidegger
saw in this double meaning a metaphor for thought and its itinerary. Every
Holzweg leads off separately, but in the same forest, and ‘it seems often as if
one is like the other. But it is only apparently so’. Like the foresters, the
philosophers ‘know what it means to be on a Holzweg’. They know, that is,
the geography of truth and error from within, and can bring us to the
threshold of something never thought before. To pursue the Holzweg is to
enter the new, although the new with obscure origins in the past.
Painted in , the same year of the pendant canvases From the Dresden
Heath, Friedrich’s Early Snow, now in Hamburg, is a picture of the new,


   

of a world uncontaminated by a human gaze. The snow is untouched. I am

the first to enter this wood; no footprints mar the uniqueness of my expe-
rience. My eyes dart about the canvas’s surface, drawn by the blank white-
ness. My glance does not disturb the snow, but visits the scene with the
snow, which recalls fortuitously the etymological link of ‘glance’ to ice
(French glace), suggesting the sliding of the eye about this snowy scene.
The snow withstands my gaze and the frozen scene, halted like myself in
passage, remains present to me, its earliest discoverer. While the canvas was
first exhibited in Dresden in  under the title Spruce Forest in the Snow,
it has acquired the appellation Frühschnee (‘Early Snow’), suggesting that
this snow is the year’s first. Yet it could well be Frühlingsschnee, the last
snow in a thawing world of spring. Art historians still argue over the season,
just as Friedrich’s critics in  were unsure about the time of day in Cross
in the Mountains. But what is important is, of course, the uncertainty as to
whether the scene is early or late. Like so many of Friedrich’s landscapes,
Early Snow fuses temporal extremes. The coming of winter may be the
beginning of spring and the killing frost could just as well be a regenerative
thaw. Friedrich assembles the old and the new in the picture’s vegetation:
saplings rise above the snow in the foreground; behind them are older,
larger trees until, in the background, the highest trees are red and dry
with age. This notion of death combined with birth is developed by what
is taken to be Early Snow’s pendant: the  canvas entitled Easter Morning,
now in Madrid (illus. ). Repeating the Hamburg picture’s device of a
road leading into the picture from the lower framing edge, Easter Morning
stations three women in the foreground, recollecting the motif of the Three
Marys traditional in scenes of Christ’s Resurrection. Read together, the
two canvases would express an allegory of death and rebirth. Yet the play
of life within death, of the early within the late, is already present in
Friedrich’s Early Snow itself. Its landscape is of the fullness of the Augen-
blick which, as in the Verweile-doch of Goethe’s Faust, is the moment of
ourselves. Standing before this painting, I am the first and the last to enter
the wood.
About fourteen years before painting Early Snow, Friedrich finished
another picture of virtually the same scene (illus. ). Yet in Chasseur in
the Forest, a traveller has entered the wood, halting before the turn in the
path. His gaze penetrates the secret space that had been closed to our gaze
in the snowy turn in Early Snow, and his presence radically alters the way
we see the painted world before us. The dark figure draws attention to
himself, arresting the movements of our eye about the canvas. The world


   

 Easter Morning, . Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid.

looks altogether different with this traveller at its centre. Space organizes
itself around him: it is no longer my lovely wood, my adventure in the
snow, but his. The objects seem to desert me, showing themselves now to
him. The trees in the foreground are not my companions, but have turned
their shoulders to me as if to gaze at him; whatever is in the background
has become his vision. I do not stand at the threshold where the scene
opens up, but at the point of exclusion, where the world stands complete
without me.


   

The temporal fabric of the wood has changed, as well. In Chasseur we

oversee the experience of someone else, someone who was already there
in a past long before our arrival. Where in Early Snow I had a sense of
undisturbed presence, here I am not the first in this snowy landscape, for
the traveller remains spatially and temporally before me. Nor am I the
last. If I go forth into the painting’s space, seeking to stand where the
turned traveller pauses, I will feel myself looked at from behind. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, following Karl Jaspers, reported that patients suffering
from autoscopy (the hallucination of seeing oneself) feel the approach of
their Doppelgänger through a burning sensation in the nape of the neck,
as if someone were viewing them from behind. Autoscopy is somehow
always implied by such turned travellers in Friedrich’s paintings, for in
their faceless anonymity they mirror our act of looking in an uncanny way.
During the experience of autoscopy, we read, ‘the subject is overcome
by a feeling of profound sadness which spreads outwards and into the very
image of the double.’ The sadness of seeing oneself seeing explains, per-
haps, the melancholy colouring which a traveller gives to an empty land-
scape. Friedrich’s paintings are strangely sadder and lonelier when they are
inhabited by a turned figure than when they are empty, Who is this sole self
who halts before wandering into the painted world, and who, as Friedrich’s
contemporaries interpreted Chasseur, hears his deathsong sung by the raven
sitting in the margin that separates him from ourselves?

The Rückenfigur is not Caspar David Friedrich’s invention, having a long

if not quite coherent history in European painting before the nineteenth
century. Already in Giotto turned figures sometimes feature in the fore-
ground of a composition, establishing an imaginary fourth wall in the
picture’s cube of space. These structuring bodies, though, rarely function
strictly as viewers within the painted scene. And although Leon Battista
Alberti in his treatise On Painting (–) instructs artists to people their
pictures with ‘someone who admonishes and points out to us what is hap-
pening there’, Italian pictorial practice favoured to this end figures gazing
out of the picture at the viewer, rather than Rückenfiguren looking in. Early
in the Northern tradition, Jan van Eyck used the Rückenfigur to advertise
the extraordinary visual prospect realized through his craft (illus. ). In
the midground of the great Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, dating from
around  and now in the Louvre, a man peers over a battlement to
behold a bustling town and mountainous landscape beyond, while his com-
panion in a red turban (thought to be a self-portrait of the artist) looks on.


   

 Jan van Eyck,

Madonna of
Chancellor Rolin,
c. . Musée du
Louvre, Paris.

Confronted with a painting of unprecedented pictorial veracity, detail and

scope, Jan van Eyck’s viewers discover their own attitude of visual amaze-
ment mirrored and thematized by these diminutive Rückenfiguren. With
the further development of landscape painting in the sixteenth to eight-
eenth centuries, the Rückenfigur took its place within the stock repertoire
of staffage which might ornament a panorama’s foreground and determine
the overall character and message of the scene. In the ‘view-painting’ or
veduta, a turned figure could establish the vista’s scale, enhancing its monu-
mentality and marking off the whole pictorial field as something ‘worth
seeing’. In one popular variant, the Rückenfiguren is an artist who sits at the
margin of the scene, sketching the landscape we see. The draughtsmen at
the right of a landscape etching of  by the Dutch artist Allaert van
Everdingen represent the operation of drawing from nature on which the
print itself claims to be based (illus. ).
Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren are perhaps closest to this conceit, although the
event they dramatize is never the actual labour of making, but rather the
originary act of experience itself. Appearing alone, in symmetrical pairs
(illus. , , ), or in groups contemplating a sublime view (illus. , ,
), they dominate the natural scene with their presence, defining landscape
as primarily the encounter of subject with world. They are the ubiquitous,
almost obsessive, signatures of Friedrich’s Erlebniskunst. In Chasseur in the


   

 Allaert van Everdingen, The Draughtsman, .

Forest, it is true, the Rückenfigur conveys a very specific message, as well.

Dressed in the uniform of the Napoleonic cavalry, the horseless chasseur
in the German forest stands for the French foe vanquished in the wars of
liberation. In this Rückenfigur’s solitude, as well as in the assembled signs of
his impending death, Friedrich does not simply mourn the human condition,
but also celebrates Germany’s military victory. Usually, however, such turned
figures are not foes but reflective foils of both artist and viewer, figures, that
is, of the subject in the landscape. As such, they have a far more totalizing
tenor that sets them apart from the marginal staffage that ornamented earlier
landscape art.
This change is clear if we compare Friedrich’s Rückenfigur to similar
devices within the Baroque emblem tradition. Art historians have long noted
the striking similarities between some of Friedrich’s landscapes and Jan
Luiken’s illustrations for Christophoro Weigelio’s popular emblem book,
Ethica Naturalis (). In Luiken, the human figure dominates the land-
scape (illus. ). Indeed he seems to exist in a separate space, rather like an
actor before a stage setting. He does not claim to ‘experience’ the scene, the
landscape being only a book which he reads and interprets. Often Luiken’s
figures will gesture towards the scene, as if to sav, ‘Behold!’ They are not con-
cerned with the beauty of the landscape, but with its public and usually,
moral significance, which they mediate in the texts appearing around the
image. In Friedrich’s Mountain Landscape with Rainbow, the landscape
has grown and the Rückenfigur has fallen silent (illus. ). What he medi-
ates is not a meaning, but an experience of the full presence of landscape.
This landscape may have, like the face of the halted traveller, more to it than
meets the eye, yet this ‘more’ is closed to us, a private inscription carried


   

 Jan Luiken,
Iris, etching.
Illustration from
Christophoro
Weigelio, Ethica
Naturalis
(Nuremburg,
).

by the wanderer whose experience we only oversee. As if to indicate the

personal dimension, Friedrich has fashioned the Rückenfigur as a portrait
of himself, reoccupying but transforming the old motif of the artist sketch-
ing in the landscape.
Friedrich represents himself several times as Rückenfigur. Occasionally,
and more hauntingly, he observes his own family from behind, as in his
masterpiece, Evening Star, dating from around  and now in Frankfurt
(illus. ). Against a sublime evening sky, with the silhouette of Dresden’s
church recognizable on the horizon, Friedrich depicts what probably are
his wife and children walking homewards: to the left, Caroline née Bommer,
whom Friedrich married in ; by her side one of the couple’s daughters,
either Emma (b. ) or Agnes Adelheid (b. ); and at the crest of a
small rising, with his arms raised as if to greet the immensity of the view,
or to grasp the veering bands of clouds above, their youngest child and
only son Gustav Adolf (b. ). The boy’s gesture is unusually animated,
for Friedrich typically pictures subjects frozen in contemplation, their
stillness a mark of an immense interiority. It is as if, through the gesture of
his son, Friedrich were trying to capture the entire afflatus of experience
in a single gesture, or as if, from the perspective of a boy, nature’s
engulfing infinity can be wrested down to earth. And the world responds.
For if we block out the child from the picture, observing the scene peopled
only by the mother and daughter at the left, the bands of clouds and sky
appears to rise higher above the land. Friedrich’s son as Rückenfigur draws


 Pierced Rock in Uttewald Valley, c. . Museum Folkwang, Essen.


   

down to earth the evening sky, as if for a moment catching the departing
light in the coincidence of his open arms and the edge of the horizon’s
darkening bank of clouds.
Friedrich observes his family’s homecoming from afar, expressing
poignantly what we know of the artist’s personal stance in later life. After
his initial success with Cross in the Mountains, and following a period of
critical acclaim and financial stability between  and about ,
Friedrich’s star began to fade, his art overshadowed by new directions in
landscape; the Nazarene painters in Vienna and Rome, the ‘heroic’ land-
scape of Joseph Anton Koch and Ludwig Richter, and the naturalism of
the Düsseldorf School. Having failed to secure a regular professorship at
the Dresden Academy, and with ever fewer patrons, Friedrich grew embit-
tered, self-pitying and distrustful of his friends, turning even against his
wife, whom he suspected (wrongly, Carus informs us) of sexual infideli-
ties. In June  he suffered a stroke which left him debilitated until his
death in . Executed just before , Evening Star reads as one of his
innumerable ‘last testaments’ from the period (this is, after all, the artist
who still in his early thirties fantasized his own funeral in an  sepia).
On the last hill that shows him all his valley, Friedrich turns and stops and
lingers, before, like his Rückenfiguren, he forever takes his leave.


 Summer, . Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen,
Neue Pinakothek, Munich.


 Monk by the Sea, –. National Gallery, Berlin.


 Abbey in the Oak Forest, –. National Gallery, Berlin.


 Mountain Landscape with Rainbow, c. . Museum Folkwang, Essen.


 Mountain Pasture with the Source of the River Elbe, c. –.
Private collection, Munich.


 Landscape in Riesengebirge, c. –. Stiftung Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur.


 Riesengebirge Landscape, c. . National Gallery, Oslo.


 Memories of the Riesengebirge, c. . Hermitage, St Petersburg.


 Oak Tree in the Snow, c. . National Gallery, Berlin.


 Flatlands on the Bay of Greifswald, c. . Sammlung Georg Schäfer,
Obbach near Schweinfurt.


 Seashore in the Moonlight, c. . National Gallery, Berlin.


 Woman before the Setting Sun, c. . Museum Folkwang, Essen.


 10

Theomimesis

The Eighth of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (), whose lines I
have borrowed in reading Friedrich’s Evening Star, reminds us that the
Romantic agon between viewer and world is finally a struggle unto death:

And we, spectators always, everywhere

Looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us. We arrange it. It decays.
We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.

Seldom is this struggle as powerfully visualized as in Caspar David

Friedrich’s most monumental Rückenfigur, the Wanderer above the Sea of
Fog from about , now in Hamburg (illus. ). Pictured large at the
canvas’s centre, and determining the landscape’s vertical format through
his upright form, the halted traveller dominates our visual field. He estab-
lishes the central vertical axis of the valley’s bilateral symmetry, so that
the flanking hills and banks of fog appear like extensions of his person;
and at the horizontal of his waist, made visible by the gathering of his
green coat and occurring at the canvas’s midline, the picture divides into
symmetrical upper and lower halves. Even the picture’s strongest element
of asymmetry – the right slope of the summit in the foreground which is
carried into the diagonal arrangement of fog-covered peaks to the left –
relates subtly to the traveller. For from the position of his body he seems
to have ascended in this direction. Upon him, rather than on some con-
structed vanishing point in the distance, all lines of sight converge, as if
landscape were the mapping of world to body.
The visual prominence of the Rückenfigur has encouraged speculation
as to his specific identity. According to a tradition dating from the time
before the canvas appeared on the art market in the s, the turned
figure represents a high-ranking forestry officer named von Brincken,
whom historians have identified as a certain Colonel Friedrich Gotthard
von Brincken of the Saxon infantry. In Friedrich’s canvas, the Rückenfigur


 

wears the green uniform of the volunteer rangers (Jäger) – detachments

called into service by King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia to war against
Napoleon. Von Brincken was probably killed in action in  or ,
which would make the  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog a patriotic epi-
taph. Friedrich turns his subject away from us, rendering him subtly
anonymous, or perhaps universalizing his cause; and although we cannot
see his face we can share in the substance of his vision.
Day has dawned in the mountains, and the view beyond the traveller lies
mostly concealed, veiled by a fog that lifts here and there to reveal fragments
of a vast panorama. Friedrich paints away the substantiality of these islands
of the visible, allowing the murky pattern of trees in a far-off forest to
mingle with the shadowed contours of the clouds upon its slope, rendering
rocks like trees, and trees like puffs of smoke. Space is neither an even pro-
gression of objects into depth, nor the clean break between foreground and
background established in so many of the artist’s compositions. Rather,
Friedrich hints at the structure of a properly receding landscape through the
Claudian device of flanking and overlapped coulisses (here formed by rocks,
forested hills and bands of clouds), while simultaneously eradicating the con-
nective ground in between. Instead of an avenue of sight carried by river,
bridge or valley, we are given only discontinuous moments of passage to the
horizon: coulisses rising from and enframing a void.
Friedrich places these coulisses in space by registering in the level of
their detail their distance from the eve. Thus the fir tree on the nearest
rocks, peaking from behind the Rückenfigur’s left knee, is fully legible
down to its individual twigs, while further away the trees become progres-
sively more general: first as the contours of their bows, then as tiny clumps,
together indicating a ‘forest’. Strangely, though, these differentiations
finally read as repetitions of the same. The telescoping forms of needle,
twig, bough, tree, forest, mountain and world are analogized, rendered as
equivalent patterns on the canvas’s surface. Within this ambiguity of
scale, Friedrich lays bare the picture’s only constant index. For what takes
the place of the central avenue of sight connecting the foreground with
the edge of the sky, indeed what is enframed like a view-line by the partial-
ized coulisses, is the landscape’s internal viewer himself: the Rückenfigur
standing parallel to the picture plane and constituting the scene’s place of
convergence. This replacement of the geography of the view by the body
of a viewer, thematizes the nature of our own viewing experience before
Wander above the Sea of Fog. For by rendering his landscape insubstantial
and spatially unstable, the artist forces us to participate directly in what


   

we see. The mists and mirages, rocks and trees are what they are only
through the creative imagination of the beholder.
Such wilful obscurity in the representation of landscape has its tradi-
tional legitimation in the aesthetics of the sublime. Already in  Edmund
Burke, in his enormously influential Philosophy Enquiry into the Origins of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, valorized obscurity and strength
of expression over the Neo-classical ideal of clarity, precision and adherence
to rule. Burke argued that terror, the passion associated with the sublime,
is best aroused by things ‘dark, uncertain, [and] confused’, while vastness
and infinity, chief attributes of the sublime in nature, can only be elicited
through obscurity. For when we can ‘see an object distinctly’ we can ‘per-
ceive its bounds. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea’.
Friedrich himself wrote that

when a landscape is covered in fog, it appears larger, more sublime,

and heightens the strength of the imagination and excites expecta-
tion, rather like a veiled woman. The eye and fantasy feel them-
selves more attracted to the hazy distance than to that which lies
near and distinct before us.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the artist’s controlling erotic metaphor,
and his inscription of the viewing subject within the logic of male desire,
I would note that Friedrich locates sublimity not in the object itself, but
in its subjective effect on the viewer. The distant mountains and forests in
Wanderer are thus not in themselves sublime. It is their obscurity, their
presence and absence as objects of the viewer’s gaze that endows them
with their power. It was Immanuel Kant, of course, who first located sub-
limity purely within the beholding subject, rather than in objects them-
selves. In his Critique of Judgement of , we read that unlike beauty,
which ‘concerns a liking or dislike for the form of the object’, sublimity

is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, inso-
far as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within
us, and thereby also to nature outside us . . . When we speak of the
sublime in nature we speak improperly; properly speaking, sublim-
ity can be attributed merely to our way of thinking . . .

More programmatically than perhaps any other painting of the period,

Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog aspires to invoke the sublime of


 

a thoroughly subjectivized aesthetic, in which the painted world turns

inward on the beholder.
But strangely in a painting that so emphasizes the subjective standpoint,
Wanderer renders our own place as viewers of the landscape deliberately
unstable. As in Cross in the Mountains, we are left uncertain whether we
stand on solid ground behind the summit, or whether we float in space with
the clouds. The foreground pyramid rises abruptly from the lower fram-
ing edge without any clear connectives between our and the picture’s
space. Standing with its feet on the ground, however, is the Rückenfigur,
installed in the midst of things, between the vast, insubstantial landscape
and our own ambiguous point of view. It is he who mediates our experi-
ence of the scene, and who knits together the landscape’s disparate frag-
ments. Indeed it is hard to imagine what the view from the summit would
be without his centralizing and concealing presence, how, for example, the
symmetrical hills radiating from just below his shoulders would actually
meet in the valley. The Rückenfigur is so prominent in the composition
that the world appears to be an emanation from his gaze, or more precisely,
from his heart.
Discussing composition in landscape painting, Carus wrote that ‘a
painting is a fixed gaze’. Even without an internal viewer in the picture,
Friedrich’s landscapes present themselves as something seen, rather than
simply as something there. Their symmetrical design suggests the pres-
ence of an eye arranging nature, and the Rückenfigur only advertises this
presence. In a sense, he is redundant. Is not our eye enough, coupled with
the evidence of the artist’s arranging eye, to infuse the landscape with a
beholder’s gaze, or do we need another hidden look, stationed within the
painted world? Must landscape’s perceiving subject be literalized as
human figure in order for Friedrich’s images to be understood as Erlebnis?
At the centre of Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, a halted traveller gazes. It
is from his eye and heart, not ours, that the painting seems to radiate. If
repetition is at work (we seeing the Rückenfigur seeing, or, alternatively, we
seeing the artist’s vision of himself seeing), then something has been elid-
ed, for what repeats our looking, the turned traveller, hides with his body
the very thing repeated: the gaze of the subject. The hidden eye within
the picture, recuperated only in the archaizing allegorical frame of Cross
in the Mountains, testifies to a powerful dimension of loss, of absence, of
incompletion within the subject of Friedrich’s landscapes.
Friedrich is unique among European painters of the period in his
persistent use of the Rückenfigur. But the halted traveller as trope of


   

 Riesengebirge Landscape with Rising Fog, c. –. Bayerische

Staatsgemäldesammlung, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

experience, or as surrogate for the artist, and the audience, is a common

rhetorical device in Romantic literature. The situation of the traveller,
arrested by what he sees in the landscape is nowhere as centrally and
complexly explored as in the poetry of William Wordsworth. As Geoffrey
Hartman and others have shown, from An Evening Walk () to The
Prelude (, , ) and The Excursion (), Wordsworth seems
always to be travelling on foot, engaged in a journey that is punctuated by
significant pauses – the vision on Snowdon, the encounter with
Imagination after crossing the Alps, the story of the Boy of Winander –
which take the form of a meditation of a poet-traveller before some inti-
mation of death. In Wordsworth, as in Friedrich, the halted traveller
becomes inseparable from the very fabric of the represented landscapes.
While there are comparable moments in German literature of the period
that would have been known to Friedrich, Wordworth’s poetry comes
closest to the art of Friedrich in its genuinely dual emphasis on the radi-
cal specificity of nature, and on the constitutive role of an intervening
subjectivity. This subjectivity may be externalized in a figure like the halted
traveller, or it may simply be signalled by a dialectic within the lyrical ‘I’
itself, an ‘I’ always implicated in, if also agonistic to, nature’s specificity.


 

In Wordsworth’s ‘A Night-Piece’, composed in  and published in

, for example, a traveller halts and beholds a scene of clouds breaking to
reveal a vision. The poem opens with a description of a veiled setting where:

––––The sky is overcast

With a continuous cloud of texture close,

Nothing is remarkable in the landscape; the dull, flat light creates a uni-
form surface where nothing stands out and ‘not a shadow falls’, and
where, it would seem, poetic description needs no mediating figure with-
in the landscape. Then something happens:

At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam

Startles the pensive traveller while he treads
His lonesome path, with unobserving eye
Bent earthwards; he looks up – the clouds are split
Asunder, – and above his head he sees
The clear Moon and the glory of the heavens.

At the very moment when familiar nature changes, taking on an aspect

more sublime, a traveller appears upon the scene and in the poem. In
Wordsworth, this internal viewer is inseparable from the content of his
gaze, which is perfectly appropriate to the double meaning of ‘vision’ as
the faculty of sight and the thing that is seen. The wanderer changes with
the sky. Where at first he had walked with ‘unseeing eye’, himself unre-
marked and unremarking in the closed landscape, now his eyes open with
the clouds and he beholds what the heavens reveal. Of course, the glory of
heavens was there all along, being only hidden from sight. Like the frag-
mentary landscape of Friedrich’s Wanderer, the sublime as something
concealed and revealed demands that there be a seeing subject. There are
moments when the poem’s theatre of the sublime seems to fashion its pag-
eant out of and for itself, as when the vault is said to ‘deepen its unfath-
omable depth’. This turning of verb on to itself as object suggests a world
that likes its own magnificence, whether or not it is seen by man. Yet depth
is not a dimension belonging to objects themselves, but only emerges
when an object is observed in perspective. It announces an insoluble bond
between things and a seeing self by which the subject is placed in front of
them. When the clouds break in Wordsworth’s ‘A Night-Piece’, the trav-
eller appears before the heavens and, like the Rückenfigur, mediates the


   

scene as an experience. His presence is first signalled in the poem by sur-

prise: the ‘instantaneous gleam startles the pensive traveller’ into being in
the poem. This surprise, when familiar nature does something unexpect-
ed, when the landscape suddenly appears radically foreign or separate
from the self, halts the traveller and elicits his gaze.
In Friedrich’s Wanderer, the clouds open before the wanderer revealing
not the ‘glory of heavens’, but fragments of the earth as if seen from
heaven. The visions of rocky pinnacles, vast forests, open fields and far-off
mountains rise up disconnected and bottomless from the foggy deep. Yet
once in view they are clarified, each constituting a poignant little world.
The artist may celebrate the blankness of the fog and clouds, just as else-
where he reduces landscape to an empty strip of foreground on a void. How-
ever, in depicting what does appear, Friedrich refuses ever to generalize
his forms, registering always the radical specificity or Eigentümlichkeit of
each thing. For example, the summit visible above the fog to the right of
Rückenfigur, just above the level of his hips, appears within a sea of undif-
ferentiated grey like the revelation of the particular per se. The various trees
on its gentler slope are not massed together as a ‘forest’, but emerge from
the fog one by one: the lowest, at the left, a blurry, dark grey mass; the next,
a legible silhouette of boughs, trunk and branches; the third, an object
fully modelled in grisaille; and finally, just below the summit’s crest, a tree
of distinctive profile and character, and of a uniquely reddish hue, sug-
gesting the coming of autumn. It is here we discern the demonstrative
within landscape painting.
The force of this specificity can be felt if compared with the land-
scapes of the Dutch master Jacob Ruisdael. The tree at left of his Jewish
Cemetery for example, may be similarly unpredictable in its fragmentary
form (illus. ). Yet in the way its shape is answered by the bare stump at
the picture’s left, and in the artful manner of its enframement by a shad-
owed passage in the trees behind, this ruined birch merges easily into its
theatrical and gesticulating surrounds. Friedrich’s reddish tree, while not
ruined, is ultimately more fragmentary, more isolated in its form, being a
part of the genuinely hidden whole of landscape. This deeper fragmen-
tation contributes to the felt singularity of what is revealed: Friedrich
paints not the tree, as fair and universal form within an ordered compo-
sition, but rather always this tree, this oak upon these cliffs in this sea-
son. And through that particularity, which singles out both the object
viewed and the subject who views, the picture demonstrates a love and
a longing.


 

In Wordsworth, who was himself a champion of the demonstrative ‘this’

in English Romantic poetry, the apprehension of the particular is always
mixed with a feeling of bereavement. Thus in the great ‘Intimations Ode’
(), in a passage that is said to have moved William Blake deeply,
Wordsworth mourns:

But there’s a Tree, of many, one,

A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat . . .

What is lost here is childhood’s unmediated and passionate experience of

the world, but what saddens us directly as readers of the ‘Intimations
Ode’ is not Wordsworth’s personal fall into adulthood, and nor his atten-
dant intimation of mortality, but rather the way the merely remembered
but absent Tree and Field are invoked within a demonstrative diction that
desires but cannot finally have their full presence. The poignancy of the
singular emerges from a loss experienced by the poet as a disparity in feel-
ing between his present and his past, and it is instantiated within his poem
as the failure to capture, through the Fingerzeig of language, the here and
now of experience as emblematized by the humble ‘Pansy at my feet’.
Friedrich, whose paintings are similarly elegiac, conveys the singular
within a disproportion between whole and part: in Wanderer, within the
play between the obscured space which would constitute the total ‘view’,
and the isolated fragments of the visible. The landscape beyond the
Rückenfigur simply cannot be thought together as a whole. If we deduce
spatial recession from the ratio of size, for example, between the fir tree
visible behind the Rückenfigur’s knee and the tiny tree on the pinnacle fur-
thest to the left, level with the buttons of his green coat, we might assume
a horizon hidden somewhere just below this distant summit. The gently
sloping hill behind would have to be unimaginably large and far away for
it thus to rise up from the clouds beyond. Yet on its slope we can clearly
discern the trees and meadows of a proximate and familiar world, and
these give way to other hills with other horizons. Each summit, in other
words, stands both for itself and for the whole ‘landscape’ from which it
emerges into view. Yet the plurality of summits, taken collectively as the
view’s expanse, does not add together to form a stable whole, but only
replicates the whole – and always somehow a different whole – within


   

each fragmentary summit. These summits are Romantic fragments in

the quite specific sense, say, of Friedrich Schlegel’s famous Athenaeum
Fragment : ‘A fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely
isolated from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a hedge-
hog.’ Friedrich’s canvases, themselves usually small, are instances of the
singular and isolated fragment, as in the baseless, horizonless view of
Morning Fog in the Mountains of , now in Rudolstadt (illus. ), or
the Wordsworthian tree ‘of many, one’ in Oak Tree in the Snow of around
 (illus. ).
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, with its centrally placed Rückenfigur and
its thematization of the subjectively constituted nature of the visible,
reveals its fragments to be moments of visual attention. We have already
encountered similar epiphanies, similar partialized objects of the gaze,
elsewhere in Friedrich’s art, where a world suddenly becomes only visible
through a transition within our own way of seeing. In Cross in the Mountains,
the fully detailed terrain of the foreground summit, discernible only if we
bear down on the dark and glossy surface of the canvas, represents one such
moment (illus. ), as does the apparition of the departing ship in the
early painting Fog (illus ). Perhaps the most dramatic instances of such
visual fragmentation are Friedrich’s late paintings of moonlit seascapes.
In Seashore in the Moonlight from around , now in Berlin, two lights
illuminate the scene in different ways. Above, the moon shines through
the turbulent mass of clouds that occupies more than half the canvas;
below, a fire on an offshore boulder lights up a tiny scene of fishermen,
their beached craft and the water immediately before them (illus. ). We
find here the familiar contrasts between the heavenly and the earthly
spheres. Note the unbroken horizon line which divides the picture radi-
cally in two, as well as the analogized positions, within each of these
rectangular registers, of the moon and fire, and of the swirling clouds and
curved pattern of the foreground boulders. But Friedrich also demon-
strates through the effects of light the separateness of worlds, constructing
each fragment as a discrete centre of visual attention.
In Flatlands on the Bay of Greifswald, of c.  and now in Obbach in
southern Germany, he goes one step further (illus. ). The swamp, fishing
nets, sailing boat and assembled staffage, together with the thick clouds,
appear as mere coverings before a light that shines through all things. The
figures in the landscape’s midground are silhouetted against the reflective
surface of the water, as if at the brink of the world. We know that in the
s Friedrich fashioned a series of paintings executed on transparent


 

paper, which were intended to be viewed in a dark room, lit from behind
by a lamp. Although these works are now lost, their effect can be gleaned
from the uncanny illumination of the Obbach Flatlands. The light may
here have one source within the picture (indeed the medium of transpar-
ent painting insists precisely upon unifying its light source and isolating
the image from all other visible objects). But its effect is to fragment the
natural world we see, and of which we are a part, from the medium of its
appearance. Here the whole is unattainable because it is opposed to us, like
the contrast between the bright reflection on the water’s surface and the
dark, silhouetted Rückenfiguren before it.
In Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, the fact that the fog-wrapped sum-
mits can indeed appear as fragments of a whole rests upon Friedrich’s
working procedures as a painter. What gives the landscape its particular
magic, and what fixes our attention on the crafted surface of the canvas, is
our uncertainty as to how this interplay between clouds and mountains,
this seamless mix of blank obscurity and brilliant clarity, was achieved in
paint. That reddish tree on the summit at the right was clearly painted on
a ground of white which stands for ‘fog’, since Friedrich could not have
painted the tree first and then painted around its contours in white. Just
below, however, and further along the visual spectrum from clarity to con-
cealment, the process must have been the opposite. The blurred trees and
cliffs emerging from the fog would seem to have been set down first, per-
haps in contours more definite and clear than they now appear, and then
overpainted with white and grey scumbles. Yet what Friedrich’s fog
demands, and indeed advertises is that any transition from one procedure
to the other be absolutely imperceptible, that the cloud before the summit
should be of the same substance and moment as the cloud behind, and
that, in short, the necessary temporality of an artist’s manual labour be
erased. Painting, therefore, will be more than the sequential application of
colours on the canvas, appearing instead as the simultaneous revelation
and concealment of what is always already there.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog stands suspended between two notional
paintings: on the one hand, the total replication of a valley in all its detail
that has been overpainted in white; on the other hand, a blank canvas on
which have begun to appear, here and there, the fragments of a scene.
Describing the artist’s working method, Carus noted that Friedrich never
fashioned preparatory studies for his oils, but started working directly on
the blank canvas with the finished picture fixed within his mind: ‘his pic-
tures appeared at every stage in their creation always precise and ordered,


   

 Sunrise near Neubrandenburg, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

and gave an impression of his Eigentümlichkeit and of the mood in which

it [the landscape] first appeared within him.’ Friedrich’s paintings, that is,
are both already finished before they begin, being fully present to their
maker, and never final when they are done. In a canvas like the Frankfurt
Mountain Landscape, begun around  but left ‘incomplete’, probably
because of Friedrich’s stroke, we see only the underpainting of a work in
oil (illus. ). Riesengebirge Landscape of c.  (illus. ) and Sunrise near
Neubrandenburg (illus. ) have similarly been left unfinished. Yet the effect
is of a natural scene not yet emerged from fog, as if we were observing a
passage of Wanderer at an earlier stage, not of its making as painting, but
of the life of landscape itself.
Georg Friedrich Kersting’s portrait of Caspar David Friedrich in his
Studio of  shows a picture in the making. The artist is at work, gazing
intently at a canvas that stands concealed from us (illus. ). The room is
conspicuously bare, empty of the usual riot that traditionally pervades an
artist’s atelier: the stacks of paintings, drawings and prints in various states
of finish; the skulls, plaster casts, joined mannequins and other usable
props; the well-worn books of science, literature and history that make for


 

learned painting; the models, apprentices, patrons, family and friends that
play in the social drama of art’s production. Contemporaries appreciated
the calculated austerity of Friedrich’s working space. The French classi-
cist sculptor David d’Angers, visiting the artist’s studio in , discerned
in it an element of self-denial or mortification shared between the artist
and his work: ‘A small table, a bed rather like a bier, an empty easel – that
is all. The greenish walls of the room are wholly naked and without deco-
ration; the eye searches in vain for a painting or a drawing.’ When, on the
Frenchman’s insistence, Friedrich brought forth his canvases, they too
were empty, bespeaking death. The painter Wilhelm von Kügelgen, son of
Friedrich’s early friend and supporter in Dresden, Gerhard von
Kügelgen, explained in his memoirs the reason for such domestic auster-
ity: ‘Even the necessary paint box with its bottles and paint rags was
banished to the next room, for Friedrich felt that all extraneous objects
disturbed his inner pictorial world.’ Where in other artists’ studios the
clutter of objects, people and pictures turns the atelier into a microcosm of
the larger world, Friedrich fashions a votive space for interiority, a sanctu-
ary wherein the subject’s inner vision is replicated as art. In Kersting’s
painting, the artist has even shuttered the lower casement of his window,
so that the real landscape outside does not disturb the imagined landscape
he paints. The window, traditional symbol of the mimetic power of paint-
ing, here functions only as a light source. And the relation between self
and world, metaphorized elsewhere in Friedrich’s art as the partialized
view through a window (e.g. illus.  and ), is transposed to an encounter
between the artist and his vision taking shape on the hidden canvas.
In an early sketch of , Friedrich portrays himself inactive before
his sketchbook (illus. ). Supporting his head in his hand, so that his
pen is wedged against his cheek, he assumes the traditional attitude of
melancholy. His mournful glance, cast towards the window at the left,
links this sorrow, and indeed this inactivity, to a yearning for nature. The
view through the open window at once halts artistic labour, and recalls
art’s motivating task, as the imitation of nature. The Self-portrait, pro-
duced at the moment when Friedrich the landscapist falters, documents
this contradiction. Like many of his Romantic contemporaries, of course,
Friedrich valorized the direct study of nature over classicism’s imitation
of past works of art. The hundreds of drawings that he executed on his
walking tours of Rügen, Bohemia, the Harz Mountains in Saxony and the
environs of Dresden and Greifswald testify to this ideal. With the excep-
tion of his sepias and some of his more finished watercolours (e.g. illus. 


   

 Self-portrait with

Supporting Arm, c. .
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

and ), such studies from nature are generally of two kinds. Either they
record the specific shape of individual objects distilled from their settings,
as when in a drawing of  June  Friedrich set down a configuration
of rocks that he later uses for the summit of Wanderer above the Sea of
Fog (illus. ). Or else they map out the basic structure of a landscape,
fixing the particularity of its profile much like an architect’s elevation
(illus. ). Commentators have compared these sketches to the patterns
in a medieval artist’s model-book, not only because of their simplified
outline and unostentatious graphic manner, but also because of their
function within Friedrich’s working method. These are the artist’s raw
materials, his repertoire of demonstrative, singular, fragmentary forms –
the source, as it were, of that ‘Tree, of many, one’ – that he integrated
into his painted landscapes, but only when he returned to his closed stu-
dio to reimagine the landscape from within. Read from the perspective
of this process of creation, the Rückenfigur stands as a kind of trope for
origins, designating the original act of gazing by the artist-wanderer in
nature. Tropos in Greek means ‘turn’, which is exactly what happens when
Friedrich returns. His face turns from us and his gaze, the painting’s
origin, lies hidden. What we see is the artist in the landscape of a remem-
bered Erlebnis.


  Rocky Summit,  June . Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden.
 Landscape Studies (From the Region of Ballenstedt and Thale in the
Harz Mountains),  June . Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.


  Plant Study, . National Gallery, Berlin.
 Study of Groups of Trees,  and  June .
National Gallery, Oslo.


 

F.W.J. Schelling, in his  essay ‘On the Relation of the Fine Arts to
Nature’, explains this need for the artist to be both faithful to, and sepa-
rate from, nature in the production of his art. The slavish imitation of
reality will produce not works of art, but mere ‘masks’ (Larven) or empty
coverings. Therefore, the artist ‘must distance himself from [nature’s]
product or creation, but only so that he can elevate himself to a creative
power, and understand this power spiritually’. The painter imitates not
the products of nature, but nature’s process, not created nature (natura nat-
urata), but creating nature (natura naturans). This Romantic revision of
the Aristotelian definition of mimesis has, of course, wide-ranging effects
for art and its meaning. Because the work of art no longer simply copies
what is, its significance will not be exhausted by its objective reference. It
will be like the objects of nature themselves, a closed totality, a complete
universe, and hence properly a symbol. In Kersting’s portrait, nature is
visible in the artist’s studio only as clouds and sky, and the paints readied
at the centre of Friedrich’s loaded palette are appropriately the colours
blue and white. For in the concealing and revealing fogs, mists and clouds
of his painted landscapes, Friedrich emblematizes nature itself as creative
process, not finished product, a process parallel to his art.

According to Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible, on the day

of Creation ‘a fog [Nebel] went up from the Earth and moistened all land’
(Genesis :). Carus, who was a natural scientist and distinguished physi-
cian as well as a talented painter and art theorist, was intrigued by this bib-
lical fog which animated the earth, turning barren mountains into verdant
forests. In his theory of landscape painting, which he termed Erlebenkunst
(literally ‘art of the earth’s life’), he argued that fog was God’s assistant at
Creation. The emerging landscape of Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea
of Fog, balanced between determinacy and indeterminacy, chaos and par-
ticularity, evokes that primal moment and forges thus an analogy between
God’s origination of the world through a fog and the painter’s production
of the work of art through paint. Moreover, in the specific painterly man-
ner necessitated by the painting’s fog, which works to conceal all evidence
of brushwork, the manipulation of paint, and the temporal process of
manual labour, Friedrich assimilated his own act of making to the model
of divine creation. For traditionally what marked off God’s work from
man’s was that He created the universe instantaneously and ‘without
hands’ – in Greek acheiropoetos – whereas we labour manually, in time, and
by the sweat of our brow.


   

Such a reading of Friedrich’s fog sheds light on a curious episode in

the artist’s life. In  Goethe, who early on had admired aspects of
Friedrich’s work, suggested that the artist should execute a series of cloud
studies based on the new meteorological scheme developed by a British
natural historian, Luke Howard. Goethe saw in man’s capacity to classify
clouds according to type (cirrus, cumulus, stratus, etc.), a mark of the
power to decipher and appropriate (Goethe’s word is aneignen, to ‘take as
one’s own’) nature. Where in the past people had fantasized divinities and
messages in the clouds, now they were able to read the book of nature
directly, discerning there the full significance of the ‘thing itself ’. In a
group of poems celebrating Howard, Goethe sought to accommodate
poetry, with its brief of ordering the world and endowing it with human
significance, to science, understood by Goethe as both a descriptive and an
interpretative discipline. Friedrich declined Goethe’s suggestion on the
grounds that such a project would undermine the whole foundation of
landscape painting, presumably both because it would empty nature of
any ‘higher’ meaning, and because the very attempt to classify would vio-
late the essential obscurity of clouds, and with it the radical alterity of
nature itself. To have found the outline, as it were, of clouds and fog,
would mean for Friedrich the erasure of one of the foundations of his art:
the disparity between the finite and the infinite, consciousness and nature,
the particular and the universal, which a landscape like Wanderer expressed
as the contrast between mountains and fog, and between the Rückenfigur
and the cloud-theatre before him. When later, under the influence of the
younger Norwegian painter Johan Christian Clausen Dahl (illus. ),
Friedrich actually executed some studies of clouds in oil on cardboard
(illus.  and ), he was not interested in their structure and outline as
such, but in their relationship to the infinite, illuminated heavens they
cover. Goethe, for his part, swiftly developed a distaste for Friedrich’s art
after , objecting, as we have seen, to its allegorizing tendencies, and
finally declaring to a great connoisseur of Renaissance painting, Sulpiz
Boisserée, ‘one ought to break Friedrich’s pictures over the edge of a table;
such things must be prevented.’
The celebration of boundlessness and indeterminacy in landscape,
however, as sign of our inability to appropriate nature, was a stance
Friedrich shared with many in his culture. Even Carus, who in the s
came increasingly under the spell of Goethe, wrote in the second of his
Nine Letters on Landscape Painting:


 

 Johann Christian Clausen Dahl, Cloud Study with Horizon, .
National Gallery, Berlin.

Stand then upon the summit of the mountain, and gaze over the
long rows of hills. Observe the passage of streams and all the mag-
nificence that opens up before your eyes; and what feeling grips
you? It is a silent devotion within you. You lose yourself in bound-
less spaces, your whole being experiences a silent cleansing and
clarification, your I vanishes, you are nothing, God is everything.

Carus could well have had a landscape like Friedrich’s Wanderer in mind
here. Yet because sublime landscape is felt to emerge in Friedrich’s canvas
as somehow always dependent upon the cognitive act of a beholding subject,
we as viewers do not at all ‘vanish’ before the immensities we see, but feel
ourselves to be part of, or indeed participatory in, the world’s appearance.


   

Nor does the Rückenfigur, as figure of self, stand as an emblem of loss of

identity, being rather the centre and source of the picture’s symmetrical
emanation. From this perspective, the halted traveller is not subsumed by
divine glory, but is himself another deity, an alter deus turned with his back
to us, as God appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai. The great twelfth-century
Jewish theologian Maimonides interpreted this biblical ‘seeing of the back’
to mean that while God’s full presence, metaphorized as face, is denied to
man, He has vouchsafed us another gift: the knowledge of the acts attributed
to God. Nature, man and human history together constitute this figure of
the back, this concealed and revealed God as Rückenfigur. Against the
Goethean dream of Aneignung, but also against the pious cliché of an anni-
hilation of self before Creation, Friedrich fashions a more difficult vision,
one in which the experiencing self is at one foregrounded and concealed,
and in which God, submitted to a Hebraic iconclasm born perhaps from the
artist’s own Protestant spirituality, is shown in His absence, as the image of
His consequences.


 Evening Star, c. –. Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt.


 Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, –. Stiftung Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur.


 Evening, September . Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

 Evening, October . Kunsthalle, Mannheim.


 Cromlech in Autumn, c. . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.


 Solitary Tree, c. . National Gallery, Berlin.


 The Watzmann, –. National Gallery, Berlin.


 The Sea of Ice, c. –. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Morning, c. . Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover.


 Noon, c. . Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover.


 Afternoon, c. . Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover.


 Evening, c. . Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover.


 The Stages of Life, c. . Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.


 Moonrise at Sea, c. . National Gallery, Berlin.


 Landscape with Windmills, c. –. Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin.


 Ship on the Elbe in Mist, c. . Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.


 Churchyard in the Snow, c. . Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.


 11

Reflection

We need some terms to locate Friedrich’s Rückenfigur more precisely

within its historical context. According to classicist aesthetics, staffage, or
the human figure in a natural scene, will both determine the overall mean-
ing of a landscape painting, and elevate it above its lesser status within the
hierarchy of the genres to the level of a history painting. As Carl Ludwig
Fernow, one of Germany’s most eloquent spokesmen for classicism in
painting, wrote in his Roman Studies in : ‘Not through the represent-
ed environs, but through the figures that inhabit them, can a painter make
known that his picture is not the real world, but rather a scene from
Elysium.’ The shepherds, gods, heroes and martyrs populating the ideal-
ized landscapes of classicist art from Claude and Nicolas Poussin to
Friedrich’s German contemporaries Philipp Hackert, Joseph Anton Koch
and Johann Christian Reinhart, are what decide a picture’s category (pas-
toral, heroic, etc.) and glorify the general project of landscape.
Against this privileging of the human subject, Carus argued that while
the presence of ‘animate creatures’ might help to deepen the effect of a nat-
ural scene, they will remain secondary to the landscape itself: ‘Landscape
will always determine the animate creature, who will emerge necessarily out
of, and belong to, the landscape, insofar as landscape wishes to and should
remain landscape.’ As an example of this properly subordinate function of
the human figure, Carus cites the motif of a beholder in the picture: ‘a soli-
tary figure, lost in his contemplation of a silent landscape, will excite the
viewer of the painting to think himself into the figure’s place.’ In this vision
of staffage as a surrogate for the viewer, or as bridge between our world and
the painted image, we can discern one obvious interpretation of Friedrich’s
Rückenfigur. Where classical staffage aspires to humanize landscape,
inscribing it into a plot and determining its value according to an artificial
hierarchy of types, the halted traveller works to naturalize us as viewers,
enabling us to enter more fully into the landscape.
Carus’s account of the Rückenfigur as site of identification or media-
tion between painting and viewer, nature and consciousness, finite and


   

infinite, remains to this day the dominant interpretation of Friedrich’s

master-trope. ‘The motif of the Rückenfigur’, one recent historian con-
cludes, ‘is therefore no symbol of separation.’ For the Romantics them-
selves, however, the line between identity and difference was anything but
clear; it was their awareness of the deep ambiguity of mediation itself that
led them to develop those central devices of semantic estrangement, alle-
gory and irony. Nowhere is the Rückenfigur’s inescapable multivalence as
cheerfully and insistently proclaimed as in Heinrich von Kleist’s extraor-
dinary essay ‘Sentiments before Friedrich’s Seascape’, published on 
October o in a short-lived daily newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter,
edited by Kleist himself. The essay, reviewing Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea
(illus. ) which was then being exhibited at the Academy of Art in Berlin,
is divided into two parts. An extended introduction, written by Kleist,
registers the reviewer’s ‘own’ sentiments before the canvas. And a series of
fictive dialogues, composed by Clemens Brentano in collaboration with
Ludwig Achim von Arnim, represents conversations supposedly over-
heard between unnamed members of the Berlin art public. The essay
title’s plural ‘Sentiments’ (Empfindungen) has thus a threefold determina-
tion, indicating at once the multiplicity of feelings within any single view-
er, the actual dialogue format of much of the published text and the fact
of the review’s multiple authorship. What sets this instance of Romantic
dialogism into play, according to the speaker within the text who has the
last word, is the small painted figure of the monk himself. It is he ‘who
motivates everyone to articulate what many have already said in exuber-
ant, universal familiarity’. The Rückenfigur is thus made into an initiator
of discourses, somehow inspiring his viewers with unbounded exegetical
confidence. The views he elicits, while radically heterogenous in content,
all reflect the same false faith within their speakers that they know whereof
they speak.
Kleist begins by describing the experience of a real seascape. He notes
the feelings of solitude and infinity evoked by the ocean; locates these feel-
ings within their temporal embeddedness in a remembered journey to,
and an anticipated return from the sea; and states the message of the
whole:

that one has wandered out there, that one must return, that one
wants to cross over, that one cannot, that one lacks here all life and
yet perceives the voices of life in the rushing tide, in the blowing
wind, in the passage of clouds, in the solitary birds.


 

The desire for transcendence, for passage over the sea, remains unfulfilled,
and Kleist at once expresses and recuperates his loss through the discov-
ery of life within signs of the absence of life. Only now does he turn to
the painting of a seascape, Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea:

Such things are not possible before the painting; and that which I
should find within the painting itself, I have already found between
me and the picture, namely, the demand [Abbruch] that the picture
made upon my heart, and the loss [Anspruch] that the picture
inflicted upon me. And thus I was myself the Capuchin [monk], the
painting was the dunes, but that across which I should have gazed
with longing – the sea – was altogether missing.

The feelings of longing and bereavement, of lure and lack, experienced

before the landscape cannot simply be replicated by an artistic represen-
tation of landscape. Or, in the language of our discussion of Erlebniskunst
and the aesthetics of the symbol, experience and the representation of
experience are not identical. Yet by transposing the terms of the relation
art/nature Kleist discovers a deeper analogy. For what the viewer experi-
ences in landscape was not the full presence of reality and life. And there-
fore Friedrich’s painting will not evoke longing and loss by allowing us
entrance into its spectacle, any more than the real sea allowed us passage
from the shore. It will instead simply repeat the experience of exclusion,
keeping us out of the landscape by being merely a painted image. The
‘painting [is] the dune’ because rather than drawing us in, it distances us
tragically from the sea, from reality, from the fullness of life and experi-
ence. And this is what enables the viewer to identify with the Rückenfigur,
here Kleist with Friedrich’s monk: not an erasure of the boundary between
self and world, but the establishment of boundary. The viewer’s ability
‘to think himself into’ the Rückenfigur’s place becomes the very instance
of separation.
Responding to his failure to enter the picture except as a figure of
exclusion, Kleist shifts his rhetorical strategy and opens his review to the
voices of the public: ‘I listened to the reactions of the variety of behold-
ers around me, and repeat them as belonging to the picture.’ These
dialogues, the work of Brentano and Arnim, begin as a comic chain of con-
versations interlinked by misunderstandings. One viewer’s exclamation
of praise, ‘How infinitely deep!’, is taken to refer to the represented sea,
rather than to Friedrich’s canvas; another viewer, associating the picture


   

with the spirit of ‘Ossian . . . playing the harp’, is misheard as saying

‘ocean’, and a search for a harp within the landscape ensues; and a criti-
cism of the canvas as ‘atrocious’ (greulich) elicits lively agreement: ‘Yes
indeed! Greyish [gräulich]. Everything is grey.’ Such local errors serve to
ironize the deeper hermeneutic problem of the review as a whole, for they
juxtapose to the silent work of art a ceaseless babel of misreadings, of
which Kleist’s is but one.
Following these communication failures are a series of more extended
dialogues which are delightfully at odds with the high seriousness of
Friedrich’s art, yet which together outline a repertoire of possible responses
to Monk by the Sea. First in line is a governess with her charges, who treat
the picture as material for a history lesson:

Governess: This is the sea off Rügen.

First Demoiselle: Where Kosegarten lives.
Second Demoiselle: Where the products from the colonies arrive . . .

Their disconnected statements, ambiguously covering the spheres of

geography, culture and economy, but always descending into non
sequiturs (‘Ah yes, I’d love to fish together for myself a string of amber’),
mocks a ‘context’-oriented art history widely practised today. As this lit-
tle group marches on in search of further edification, a group of culture
vultures arrive, speaking in the jargon of speculative Idealism. Their
attention drawn to the figure of the monk, they offer their interpretations
as to his meaning.

Second Man: . . . [He] is the singularity in the totality, the solitary

middle-point within a solitary circle.
First Man: Yes, he is the mind, the heart, the reflection of the whole
painting in itself and about itself.
Second Man: How divinely this staffage has been chosen. It is not
here, as in the works of vulgar painters, as mere measure to estab-
lish the scale of things. He is the thing itself, he is the picture: and
in the very moment when he seems to be dreaming himself into this
landscape as into a sad mirror of his isolation, the shipless, envelop-
ing sea, which limits him like a vow, along with the empty shore,
that is joyless like his life, seems to impell itself further upon him
symbolically, like a lonely shore-plant that points beyond itself.
First Man: Marvellous! You are certainly right.


 View of a Harbour, c. . Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten, Potsdam.


   

I myself am tempted to agree. For the monk as ‘reflection of the whole

painting in itself and about itself ’ summarizes only too well what I myself
might end up saying about the Rückenfigur: that, say, he does not explain or
mediate the picture’s meaning, but only repeats the picture’s essential
deferment of meaning; or that he emblematizes the subject of landscape as
the subject in landscape; or that he is a mirror of myself, who is at once
forced and unable to constitute the picture’s true subject; and so on –
until I discover myself to be the butt of Romanticism’s caricature of
Romanticism. I could rally to my own defence, of course, and recall that for
Romantics like Brentano and Arnim, irony was the constitutive mode of all
literature, and that to find myself ironized is therefore not the same thing as
having been proved wrong. Or I might argue for the legitimation of my own
discursive style on the grounds that it is already fully present, if bathetical-
ly, within the historical material itself. Or finally I could take comfort in the
text’s parody of my work, regarding it as just one more reflection of the
beholder in the work of art, one more version of Rückenfigur, in which irony
is simply the mark of heightened self-reflexivity.
Brentano and Arnim’s dialogue marches relentlessly on. A ‘lady’
appears on the scene, accompanied by her male ‘guide’, who turns every-
thing she says into a sexual innuendo. Thus when she piously associates
Friedrich’s Monk with Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (a long English
poem in blank verse of  which had a significant effect on the early
Romantic movement in Germany), her companion encourages a chain of
associations about the night, leading first to the mention of Gotthilf
Heinrich von Schubert’s Views of Nature from the Night-Side (the text,
properly titled Views of the Night Side of the Natural Sciences, contains a
lengthy discussion of Friedrich), and then on to the guide’s off-colour
remark: ‘[I’d] rather see a view of your nature from the night-side.’
‘Nature’, in the dialect of south Germany, carries the meaning of ‘geni-
tals’. And the woman retorts angrily, ‘You are rude.’

Man: Oh, if only we could stand with each other, like the Capuchin
stands!
Lady: I’d leave you and head for the Capuchin.
Man: And ask him to couple [copulieren, meaning both ‘to marry’
and ‘to copulate’] you and me.
Lady: No, to throw you in the water.
Man: And stay with the monk alone, and seduce him, and ruin the
whole painting and all its night thoughts.


 

In this final irony of ironies, Kleist’s opening conceit of becoming the

internal viewer by the sea, of joining with the Rückenfigur so as to enter
and unite with ‘nature’, becomes debased as sexual coupling with the
monk. The woman, represented as an avid consumer of Romantic and
sentimental poetry, and therefore as a sort of female foil for the jargoniz-
ing male commentators who extemporized before the picture earlier on,
cannot express aesthetic sentiments without having them inverted by her
guide (Führer) who is also her seducer (Verführer). He, in turn, operates
by literalizing and thereby degrading the controlling terms of her aesthet-
ic, that is, the metaphor of union in Romantic Identitätsphilosophie. The
interpretative discourses generated before Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea,
submitted thus to the destabilizing fact of sexual difference, reveal their
motivation in power. The guide/seducer, by refusing to grant the woman
her sovereignty of ‘sentiment’ (earlier in the dialogue she complains, ‘If
only you didn’t just go and ruin one’s sentiments’), demonstrates the lim-
its of the Romantic ideology of freedom and autonomy in aesthetic
response. The lesson could be applied to Friedrich’s art as well. In sever-
al of his canvases, male and female viewers inhabit separate spheres, as in
Moonrise over the Sea of , where the women in the foreground are rel-
egated to the position of voyeurs to their male companion’s more primary
experience of landscape (illus. ). In Brentano and Arnim, the conflict
is momentarily resolved only when, scorned by the woman, the guide
engages in his own Romantic ekphrasis: ‘Oh, I wish I was the Capuchin,
who so eternally alone looks out into the dark, beckoning sea, which stands
before like an apocalypse; so I would long eternally for you, dear Julie, etc.’
Whereupon the woman falls into his arms, helpless before so sweet an
exegesis of the Rückenfigur.
The viewing of Friedrich’s painting has become a vehicle for sexual
temptation; or more precisely, interpretation has proved to be a product of
personal desire, dependent upon real power relations. Having demonstrat-
ed this, Brentano and Arnim produce one final speaker who stands back
from the throng and delivers his indictment. The monk in Friedrich’s
painting, he argues, ‘looks from a certain distance like a brown spot’, and the
work would be better without him. For it is the Rückenfigur who generates
the review’s clamour of ‘Sentiments before Friedrich’s Seascape’, who
indeed occasions that infinity of interpretation valorized by the Romantics,
yet he also bears no relation to the silent landscape beyond. The painting
both is and is not the Rückenfigur, art both is and is not the totality of its
interpretations; landscape both is and is not a subjective Erlebnis.


 On the Sailing-boat, –. Hermitage, St Petersburg.


 

The Rückenfigur’s paradoxical nature as site of both our identification

with, and our isolation from, the painted landscape, is usefully explicated
by F.W.J. Schelling in his Philosophy of Art of . According to him,
landscape is ‘a completely empirical art form’, in that it restricts itself to
depicting the mere appearance of objects in light and space. However,
insofar as a painter infuses such appearances, such topographies of empty
objects, with a higher significance and awakens in his viewers the ‘spirit of
ideas’, landscape will always ‘revert back to the subject’. Thus while its
material may be ‘objectively meaninglessness’, the status of landscape
painting as an art, which is to say its elevation above the formlessness of
nature, depends upon ‘subjective portrayal’ and response. This dilemma,
according to Schelling, has prompted landscape painters ‘to give this form
objective meaning by enlivening it with people’. Like Neo-classical critics
before him, Schelling regards staffage as a device for endowing landscape
with legible human significance. Yet his repertoire of desirable figures
reflects a different aesthetics. A landscape painter must be careful not to
disturb the unity of place through its human inhabitants:

Hence, the people in a landscape either must be portrayed as in-

digenous, as autochthonous, or they must be portrayed as strangers or
wanderers recognizable as such by their general disposition, appearance,
or even clothing, all of which is alien in relationship to the land-
scape itself. In this way proximity and distance yet allow themselves
to be combined in the landscape in a different sense, and the unique
feelings attendant on our conceptions of such juxtaposition can be
elicited.

Where classical staffage functioned to classify landscape according to an

objective system of genres (heroic-epic, elegiac, pastoral, etc.), Schelling’s
two figure-types, the autochthonous staffage and the wanderer, articulate
antithetical orders of experience: sameness/otherness, proximity/distance,
being/becoming, etc. Their message, if indeed it is a message, is neither a
human narrative nor a moral lesson legible in nature, but an expression of
the ways humanity has or has not access to nature and its messages.
Friedrich was probably familiar with the Philosophy of Art through his
friend and earliest exegete Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. In his Views
of the Night Side of the Natural Sciences, published in Dresden in ,
Schubert calls Friedrich’s now lost  sepia series of the Stages of Life
a ‘parable of the developmental history of the human mind represented


   

 Moonrise over the Sea, . Hermitage, St Petersburg.

through the developmental history of nature’, a formulation dependent

upon Schelling’s aesthetics and philosophy of nature. In two of
Friedrich’s earliest oils dating from this period, Schelling’s antithetical
figure-types appear as if programmatically paired within pendant land-
scapes. Summer, produced in  and now in Munich, depicts a man and
a woman embracing in a love-bower in the foreground (illus. ). This
figural group, which Friedrich has borrowed from Claude Lorrain’s Coastal
Landscape with Acis and Galatea, exhibited since  in the Gemälde-
galerie in Dresden (illus. ), is placed off to the left of the canvas, clear-
ing a centralized view to the horizon. Literally enveloped by nature, the
lovers appear as if born into each other’s arms as an autochthonous
staffage par excellence. Friedrich emphasizes the couple’s state of belong-
ing by allowing nature to respond to their forms. The vines that form the
bower concatenate about the lover’s intertwined bodies, connecting all
objects in the foreground into a single fabric. And nature itself couples its
elements in imitation of the human pair: the two round trees on the hill
form a unity, as does the birch (white like the woman’s dress) and darker
poplar in the foreground; two doves perch together on the ivy; and a pair
of heliotropic sunflowers grace the entrance to the bower. The couple,


 

together with the edenic landscape that answers their forms, embody
‘summer’ not simply as a season of the year, but also as a phase of biolog-
ical life (the stage of love, fertility and reproduction), an epoch of human
history (a golden age embodied in the couple’s Antique garb), and an
episode in ‘the developmental history of the mind’, here expressed in a
typically Romantic fashion as a reciprocity of woman and man, nature and
consciousness, painting and viewer. For the lovers not only merge with
each other and with their natural surrounds, but also mirror our own
sense of belonging as we gaze into the canvas. Uncharacteristically of
Friedrich, our eye is allowed to travel easily here from foreground to hori-
zon, following the serpentine river and checked by the flanking hills. This
equilibrium between ourselves and what we see is expressed within the
canvas not by figures like ourselves, turned to gaze into the distance, but
by the autochthonous staffage blind to the world around. Our looking has
been embodied not by the restless repetition of our gaze, but by lovers
turned inward towards each other, indeed by an idealized version of that
embrace which Brentano and Arnim’s seducer-guide imagined for the
foreground of Monk by the Sea.
In the pendant canvas Winter, completed early in , the verdant land-
scape has been replaced by a scene of death, and Friedrich carries this
change into effect throughout all aspects of his image (illus. ). The
smooth, rounded and integrated forms of Summer become jagged, hel-
ter-skelter fragments of horizontals and verticals juxtaposed; the easy
movement from foreground into distance becomes interrupted by the
broken wall of a church; the edenic earliness of an almost wholly natural
scene becomes a belated vision of ruins of past human epochs; earthly love
becomes the love of God; and the foreground pair, autochthonous, young
and swathed in classical drapery, become the single aged pilgrim in the
medievalizing habit of a monk. Here, as in Monk by the Sea and the 
Self-portrait (illus. ), the otherworldliness of monastic life serves to
heighten the idea of otherness per se attributed by Schelling to the wanderer.
In general, of course, Friedrich peoples his landscapes with wanderers
rather than ‘autochthonous beings’. Even when they are not monks, his
Rückenfiguren do not appear as inhabitants of the landscape, but as
strangers to the country, dressed in the garb of a bourgeois city dweller.
Schelling, we recall, writes that staffage can knit together near and far
through its presence in a painting. The Rückenfigur indeed draws the be-
holder into the canvas, making the landscape seem closer, more immediate,
yet his otherness to landscape makes nature something experienced only


   

 Winter, –. Destroyed.

from afar, from the standpoint of the Bürger who has lost a natural bond to
the land and seeks it now with his gaze. His gaze, which defines his sur-
roundings not as his home, but as something ‘beautiful’, distances him from
the landscape.
In Schelling, the wanderer’s exile is simply the attribute of his partic-
ular being. And the evocation of distance represents but one choice open
to the artist in rendering his work meaningful. In Friedrich, however, the
choice between autochthony and estrangement has already been made, not
as the painter’s free decision, but as our own essential being in the world.
The halted traveller, who doubles as ourselves, reveals how strangeness is
proper to our present age, which is to say, our stage of life and epoch of
history. Already in the pendant Summer and Winter, Friedrich accounts
for this state of affairs by linking staffage to its moment in time. The
lovers and the wanderer do not so much express the season in human
terms. Rather, Friedrich’s curiously archaic motif of ‘seasons’ itself func-
tions primarily to temporalize and emplot his whole artistic project, to
define as ‘era’ the vision that is his. The artist-monk before a ruined
church, the altarpiece abandoned in the landscape, the barren alder in the
snow, the present as a sad remembrance of the past: all these have become


 

moments in a process and a history, or better, signs of the alienating

dimension of history as such.
In the sepia Stages of Life, completed by  but developing and part-
ly repeating compositions from the lost series of  discussed by
Schubert, Friedrich envisions the whole of this process. The seven sheets,
now kept in Hamburg, describe simultaneously a cycle of the cosmos, the
epochs of history, the stages of life, the seasons, and the times of the day.
The lovers of the Munich Summer are followed here from cradle to grave,
their relationship to landscape and to each other reflecting their various
temporalities. Following a vision of the cosmos at Creation (illus. ), the
couple appears in Spring (illus. ) as infants born from the land itself,
their heliotropic gaze fixed on the morning light. In Summer, they are
again lovers, here surmounted by a prospect of their home (illus. ).
Autumn finds them as Rückenfiguren travelling upon the path of life (illus.
). Dressed for war, the man marches towards the bright city at the
right, past a hero’s monument that might soon be his; the woman gestures
towards the mountains, which, marked by a cross, suggests the difficult
path of virtue. And while Autumn may thus be a scene of parting, Winter
gathers the couple at their grave (illus. ), while the final sheets follow
the fate of their bodies (illus. ) and the progress of their souls (illus.
). What interests us here is how Schelling’s distinction between
autochthonous being and traveller is plotted not simply as alternative
types of staffage, but as moments in a totalizing history of nature and
man. The movement from Summer to Autumn, which is the turning point
from life to death, as well as from nature to culture, occasions a change in
staffage, and defines the Rückenfigur specifically as something late, some-
thing passing into death. The same holds true for Friedrich’s – Times
of the Day, now in Hanover, in which ‘evening’ is expressed through the
presence of halted travellers in the wood (illus. ).
But Friedrich’s most mature statement of autochthony and wandering
as fundamentally temporal categories are his pendant canvases Solitary
Tree and Moonrise at Sea of , both now in Berlin (illus.  and ).
These landscapes contrast not so much different seasons or times of day,
nor even antithetical types of staffage, but rather two modes of human
experience relative to the world. In Solitary Tree, we behold a wide, flat
valley that embraces us as it does the central oak. Each tree, pond and
hamlet is mapped into a perfectly legible space, and we take pleasure in the
way our eye can colonize the scene: how, for instance, the many little
wreaths of smoke sent up among the trees – signs of human habitation


 Sea with Sunrise, from the Stages of Life series, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Skeletons in Cave, from the Stages of Life series, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Spring, from the Stages of Life series, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Summer, from the Stages of Life series, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Autumn, from the Stages of Life series, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Winter, from the Stages of Life series, c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 

 Angels in Adoration, from the Stages of Life series, c. .

Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

throughout the landscape – keep us at home wherever we look; how, too,

our high perspective on the whole forbids any concealment, any loss of
sovereignty over what we see. The shepherd with his flock is therefore
appropriate here, not simply because he belongs to such a vision of at-
homeness in the landscape, but because our own viewing, too, is a pastoral
exchange, an easy dialogue of mind with nature and mind with mind. In
Moonrise at Sea, enough has been retained of this earlier architecture for
us to know how much is lost. The valley’s flanking hills have become
curved banks of clouds; the distant mountain a glowing moon; the central
tree a boulder on which sit, in the garb of city-dwellers, three travellers
turned to the sea. Yet where formerly we were surrounded by the land-
scape, now we face a void of sea and sky. And where near and far were
equal to our gaze, now all is directed outwards, and the shepherd in the
landscape has accordingly become three viewers of the landscape.
These three strangers on the rock need not be watching the passage of
ships at sea for us to know that their message is death. Within their hidden
gaze itself, they heighten our sense of directionality of sight, reminding
us of our blindness to what lies behind, and to where we now stand. And


   

they metaphorize thereby the loss always sustained by us as directional

beings caught in the irresistible flow of time. Friedrich brings us from our
elevated place in Solitary Tree down to earth, to a place behind and below
the Rückenfiguren. The very idea of a ‘subjective viewpoint’ undergoes in-
quiry: it is a stage within the life of humanity where landscape no longer is
lived but viewed. The contrasts in Solitary Tree and Moonrise between ob-
jective and subjective, morning and evening, nature and culture, pastoral
and elegiac, country and city interpret the very project of landscape paint-
ing and its subject.
‘Poets’, writes Friedrich Schiller in On the Naive and Sentimental
Landscape in Literature (), ‘will either be nature or they will look for
lost nature.’ While the shepherd of Solitary Tree may be nature, the vision
that encompasses him as well as Moonrise is clearly that of one looking for
lost nature. Friedrich knew that his sentimental search was born from his
place in time, and that the classical categories of landscape such as pas-
toral and heroic, were no longer present, were now moments in a history.
Schiller, asking how this history began, wrote again the story of the Fall:

It comes from this, that nature for us has vanished from humanity
and we only meet it in its true form outside of humanity in the
inanimate world. Not our greater accord with nature, quite the con-
trary our opposition to nature in our relationships, circumstances,
and customs, drives us to seek a satisfaction in the physical world
which is not to be hoped for in the moral world . . .

Landscape can replace history painting because the impulse to paint land-
scape is itself the mark of our place in time.


 Two Men Contemplating the Moon, . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.


 Ulrich von Hutten’s Grave, c. –. Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Weimar.


 Graves of Ancient Heroes, . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Eldena Ruin, c. . National Gallery, Berlin.


 Meadow near Greifswald, c. –. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Rocky Gorge, c. . Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


 12

Déjà vu

The Rückenfigur confers upon a landscape an aspect of pastness or belat-

edness. Let us experience this by returning to Friedrich’s wood, this
time through his canvas Evening from the series of – (illus. ).
Consider first the scene without the two dark figures, hiding them, say,
with a finger. We see a scene late in the day. We, however, do not feel late;
indeed we have arrived in time to see the sun’s afterglow. The landscape
is present to us and the day, though it has passed, has given birth to a
beautiful moment. Our eye passes easily to the distant brightness, through
the diaphanous band of tree trunks that lies between the darkening areas
of rising terrain below and impenetrable foliage above. Now we lift our
finger from the two halted travellers, and the structure of the landscape
suddenly shifted, turning away from us to surround them. Even the sun-
set had changed, becoming accessible only by way of the travellers, who
hauled us from the distance back into the wood, installing us always
behind. What we saw becomes what they had already been seeing in a past
long before our arrival. Their anteriority, expressed as our view of their
backs, deepened our sense of ‘evening’. It enabled the canvas not only to
depict a late time of day, but also to elicit within us an experience of our
own lateness as subjects of landscape.
Romantic poetry can help us navigate this pastness in Friedrich’s land-
scapes, for it mounts an argument of its own about the temporality of
experience. In Resolution and Independence, composed in , William
Wordsworth articulates a similar tense shift to the one we posited for
Evening, presenting a landscape before and after it is inhabited by a traveller.
The poem opens with a description of nature written in the pure present:

. . . now the sun is rising calm and bright;

The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters
And all the air is filled with the pleasant noise of waters.


   

Morning discovers a landscape in harmony with itself. The birds, simul-

taneously attending to their own voice and answering each other’s song,
embody the pastoral ideal of a poetry in perfect reciprocity with nature
and society, while the ‘noise of waters’, Wordsworth’s preferred image of
inspiration, augurs success for the poet, as well. Yet when the poet him-
self enters the scene in the third stanza, everything slips away:

I was a Traveller then upon the moor;

I saw the hare that raced about with joy;
I heard the woods and distant waters roar . . .

‘Now’ becomes ‘then’ when the subject appears on the moor, and
Wordsworth, no longer able simply to hear the waters roar, registers his dis-
tance from poetic voice and natural reciprocity through the past tense heard.
Of course, as Gottfried Ephraim Lessing observed in the Laocoön
(), poetry as an expressive medium employs ‘articulate sounds in
time’, while painting ‘uses forms and colours in space’, which enables the
former to articulate tense shifts that are impossible in the latter.
Friedrich’s painting Evening without its Rückenfiguren is as present to us
as painting as it is with them. We only ‘read’ the two dark patches of paint
as travellers and invest them with a gaze. The shift in time that these
figures seem to occasion is an illusion born from our encounter with the
representation of an other. That Friedrich’s paintings seem like land-
scapes already seen, even if we behold them for the first time, suggests the
mysterious phenomenon of the déjà vu. In the déjà vu, I feel as if what I
am experiencing has already happened, and I have been thrown back into
a past moment of my life. While the illusion lingers, I experience a sense
of expectancy, as if I know for sure what will happen next. What I antici-
pate in this immediate future is that I will recall the original experience
that I now feel myself repeating. I await a recognition that will turn the
déjà vu into a memory, one which will recapture some lost past. The
recognition fails to come and the déjà vu fades. What is perplexing in this
failure is that the anticipated moment a little further on contains the illu-
sion of a past origin of experience. The déjà vu excites us with an antici-
pated return, yet leaves us in a state of exile; anticipation becomes finally
nostalgia for a place I have never visited. The Rückenfigur in Friedrich
occupies this curious place a little further on where the past is made pres-
ent. It stands before us already there in the place we hope to be. From this
vantage point, we occupy its past, the place from which it has wandered.


  

Its footprints lead back to us. And yet, from another perspective, the
Rückenfigur as an emblem of subjective experience, or even as painted
object, is a trace of the past. It gazes not into its future, but into a now
concealed past anterior to its being: the unseen wood, the unpainted sur-
face of the canvas. We, the community of viewers who pass behind, are its
future. Thus walking forth into a world that is both past and future, the
Rückenfigur can show us a vision of having already been in a place never
visited before. It marks a locus of fulfilled desire, desire with its endlessly
deferred anticipations and its embeddedness in pasts we never experi-
enced, desire as it was formulated in Sigmund Freud’s Heraclitean apho-
rism: ‘Wo es war, soll ich werden’ (Where it was, there I shall come into
being’).
‘What is called “romantic” in a landscape’, wrote Goethe in his Maxims
and Reflections, ‘is a silent sense of the sublime in the form of the past, which
is to say, of solitude, of absence, of seclusion.’ Friedrich sometimes registers
the temporality of his scenes in their titles, as in his pendant pictures called
From the Dresden Heath (illus.  and ) or, more explicitly, in the canvas ex-
hibited in Dresden in  under the title Memories of the Riesengebirge
(illus. ). Yet even without such textual evidence, his paintings can read
as landscapes of memory. In the Meadow near Greifswald of around ,
the artist’s birthplace becomes a distant object of longing or nostalgia, not
simply because a golden light envelopes the silhouetted city like a vision of
paradise, or even because the city’s distant gate, occurring at the precise
midpoint of the visible horizon, discloses a special relation between the dis-
tant city and the original viewing subject (illus. ). Friedrich locates us in
a dark and more imperfect foreground zone with no clear link to the
prospect beyond. The bank of earth pushes us back from Greifswald and
its beckoning gate, setting our own perspective off against a more privileged
position within the visible, here occupied by the blissful horses leaping on
the sunlit field.
More commonly, of course, it is the Rückenfigur that occupies this place
a little onward into the scene. In Woman before the Setting Sun of around
, the subject in the landscape blocks with her body our view of the
departing sun (illus. ). The woman, who probably represents Friedrich’s
wife Caroline in the first year of marriage, stands at the centre of the can-
vas, at the dead end of a path flanked by boulders. The rays of the sun
seem to converge at her womb and are picked up again in the radiating
lines of her gathered gown, in her outstretched arms and her crenellated
headdress. She becomes the sunset we cannot see, rather like the halted


   

traveller was figured as source for the vision of landscape in Wanderer above
the Sea of Fog (illus. ). And she recuperates the departed sun of Cross in
the Mountains (illus. ), not only by inhabiting the radically mediated posi-
tion of the effigy of the dying Christ, but also, perhaps, by her projected
role as mother to a future child. The sun in Cross in the Mountains, we
recall, was partly an emblem of King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden, whose
promise for Friedrich would be reborn as Caroline’s first son also named
Gustav Adolf. While she stands before the setting sun, the turned woman,
crowned like a goddess, this becomes Aurora, like Runge’s striding woman
in small Morning, only seen from behind.
Woman before the Setting Sun is Friedrich’s vision of origins, yet the
experiencing human subject as source of art, the sun as giver of light and
life, and the woman as mother to the artist’s future self, have all been con-
cealed or turned away from the artist and from ourselves. Perhaps in
answer to Runge’s small Morning, in which beginnings proliferate from an
open centre outward past the picture’s frame and towards us, Friedrich
fashions a movement into absence: the sunrise that takes place as sunset,
the anticipated son that appears as the departing sun and overthrown sun-
king, the birth that is prefigured at the dead end of a path leading
nowhere. Our position behind this convergence of past and future is not
altogether melancholy. If the sun were real, its light would blind. If it were
painted, its colours would disappoint. The light of the sun, like the origin
of painting, is a moment that shall have already passed away and can only
be imagined retrospectively. Or as Wordsworth writes of the experience of
the nature’s rebirth in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, ‘And I must think,
do all I can/ That there was pleasure there.’
Experience is full of memories of pasts we never really experienced.
Such gaps in our temporal being are a central concern of Romantic crisis
poems. In ‘Tintern Abbey’ (), for example, Wordsworth feels himself
‘changed’ when he returns to the banks of the Wye River and tries, through
a remembrance of things past, to heal the discontinuity of days not bound
each to each. And although he can describe vaguely a time when nature
was ‘all in all’, he complains finally, ‘I cannot paint what then I was’, leav-
ing us with the sense that the landscape of memory is as elusive as the déjà
vu. Similarly, in the sleep-filled opening of ‘Frost at Midnight’ (),
Samuel Taylor Coleridge muses on the fabric of his past and seeks a mood
of sympathy in which he can bless the future: his infant son cradled by his
side. The ‘film’ flapping back and forth on the fire grate becomes a vehicle
for memory, for according to a superstition alive in Coleridge’s childhood,


  

such soot was called a ‘stranger’ and was supposed to portend the arrival
of some absent friend. Gazing at the film, the poet recalls a time in his
youth when he had gazed at such a sight:

But O! how oft,

How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place . . .

The memory of having seen the ‘stranger’ in youth evokes within itself
another memory of the poet’s earliest childhood. In this remembrance of
having already remembered, Coleridge anticipates the future. The bells of
his birthplace ring ‘falling on [his] ear/ Most like articulate sounds of
things to come!’ This projection of the future from the past, of
Coleridge’s adulthood now at the side of his sleeping child from out of the
memory of the child he was, is an ‘[e]cho or mirror seeking of itself ’, in
which before and after play about an elusive present. The anticipated
figure is held in another awaited moment. The ‘stranger’ augurs the
appearance of some past acquaintance: ‘my heart leapt up/ For still I
hoped to see the stranger’s face’. The ‘stranger’ will not reveal something
strange. Fluttering on the threshold between the canny and the uncanny,
it will herald the deeply familiar, the countenance of some friend or rela-
tive. As in the déjà vu, the sight of the ‘stranger’ anticipates a figure in
which something will return; but in the poem, as again in the déjà vu, the
stranger does not yield a familiar face. The sooty flap, fluttering this way
and that, elicits something hidden, something secret: ‘For still I hoped to
see the stranger’s face . . . ’ (italics mine). Coleridge here articulates our
desires when we confront Friedrich’s halted travellers. We anticipate the
turn of the Rückenfigur whose face will remain always hidden.
The German poet Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué expressed this antici-
pation as a desire in his ekphrastic poem of  on Friedrich’s Woman at
the Window (illus. ):

Who draws me on, through a magical force?

I might almost flee, but I cannot yet from hence!
I might approach her – stand back, O bold undertaking!
Do not enrage the magnificent figure!


   

O turn you – no, no, O do not turn

Your face toward me, gracious riddle!

The Rückenfigur evokes in the poet both desire and anxiety, desire that he
should see her face and anxiety that he should incur her wrath or uncover
her mystery. Such a turning would indeed change the fabric of Friedrich’s
painted world. The Rückenfigur intensifies our sense of the forward direc-
tion of our experience of the painting. It seems to direct our look in the
direction of its gaze, a gaze imagined in the field of the other. Of course,
what we experience is only the direction at the heart of our bodily experi-
ence: we see only from our face. To experience blindness, we must not
close our eyes (for then we see darkness and a play of after-images), but
try to see from the back of our head, a position of sightlessness which the
Rückenfigur enacts in relation to us. What would happen if it would turn
and face us? The dark figures of Evening are indistinct enough to imagine
this movement (illus. ). If the eyes of the travellers were staring at you,
eyeing you with the same indifference as you eye them, the painted world
would shift ‘as with the might of waters’. The trees, flowers, the luminous
light on the horizon would also stare at you. The structure of the land-
scape would turn inside out, like a glove too hastily removed from a hand.
The recognition that one has been seen comes as a shock, changing all
perspectives in our world, ordering it from the privileged position of the
travellers who watch us. Such terrible turns are mythologized variously as
the face of the Medusa, the evil eye, the gaze of the Doppelgänger that
kills, the backward glances of Lot’s wife and of the poet Orpheus. The
turn of the Rückenfigur would render us part of the painting, would turn
us to paint.
Such turns of an Other, such shifts from seeing to being seen, have a
central place in Wordsworth’s poetry and belong to the motif of the halt-
ed traveller. Consider the disturbing effect of the gaze in the ‘Stolen Boat’
episode of the autobiographical poem The Prelude ( version). The
story takes place in the poet’s youth, when, as Wordsworth writes, ‘I was a
fell destroyer.’ In the wake of his childish disregard (in German Rücksicht-
slosigkeit, literally ‘backward viewlessness’) for nature he hears something
creeping up from behind:

. . . when the deed was done

I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds


  

Of undistinguishable motion, steps

Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

Signs of the approach of the Other here seem more imagined than real:
its steps echo as silence within silence. Its presence is felt, though invisi-
ble and ‘undistinguishable’, perhaps because it is the totality of the visible
that will fix him in its gaze. The event takes place, Wordsworth notes, ‘in
a vale/ Wherein I was a stranger’, and it begins with seeing: ‘No sooner
had I sight of this small skiff . . . Than I unloosed her tether and
embarked.’ Rowing out on to the lake in the stolen boat, the boy reveals
his narcissistic feeling of power in his gaze:

. . . as suited one who proudly rowed

With his best skill, I fixed a steady view
Upon the top of that same craggy ridge
The bound of the horizon . . .

He gazes toward what he thinks are the limits of his world, rowing forward,
yet facing back. This reversed gaze (Rücksicht) yields a deeper reversal.
Something rises up from the bounds of the boy’s horizon faster than he
can row:

. . . a huge cliff
As if with voluntary instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and . . .
. . . like a living thing Strode after me.

The mountain seems to follow the boat because the smaller ridges in the
foreground appear to recede more swiftly into depth. The cliff, relative to
the foreground, disobeys perspective, growing in its apparent size as it
becomes more distant. Accordingly, the boy feels the world moving in the
reverse direction of his rowing; he is hauled backwards in the direction of
his turned gaze. The phenomenon itself is a product of the gaze for, in
reality, the landscape is motionless; only when the scene is beheld from
the boy’s particular perspective (one of a ‘stranger’ moving about in a
landscape not his own) does the world have this animism. When the land-
scape turns inside out, the boy invests the huge cliff with a face (the


   

mountain ‘uprears its head’) and a gaze that pursues him. Thus followed,
the boy-traveller must halt and return to shore.
In the famous ‘Boy of Winander’ episode of The Prelude, there is a
similar experience of being seen by the gaze of nature, this time ending in
death or annihilation. The boy, we recall, believes he is fooling nature with
his ‘mimic hootings’ that stir the owls into song. His sounds seem to ini-
tiate the natural hoots that follow antiphonally. But when ‘pauses of deep
silence mock his skill’, he discovers the phoné of nature which is prior to
his voice, and which enters into his heart, along with the whole visible
scene. Where the experience of being watched in the ‘Stolen Boat’
episode involves a reversal in spatial direction, here the reversal is revealed
as a temporal one. Interestingly, the hyperbole of entrance takes the form
of a flowing in or influence of the world into the heart of the boy. Such an
influence, like the gaze of the Other, annihilates, and the boy dies ‘in
childhood ere he was full ten years old’.
When the child returns home in the ‘Stolen Boat’ episode, he is aware
of a sense of ‘solitude or blank desertion’. It is the loneliness of a height-
ened self-consciousness born from guilt. The boy is not merely seen by
the gaze of the cliff; he is also caught in the act of trespass or theft. Here,
as later in Jean-Paul Sartre’s scenario in the park in Being and Nothingness
(), being seen involves becoming an object which the Other judges.
Guilt and a sense of separation of self are the costs of knowledge. When
Eve and Adam ate of the Tree of Knowledge, ‘the eyes of them were
opened, and they knew that they were naked’ (Genesis :). Consciousness
involves a new way of seeing: the self exposed to a gaze that makes it feel
naked, and because naked, self-conscious. To know one is exposed involves
distinguishing oneself from nature, and experiencing one’s own body as
something that can be looked at and must therefore be hidden. One cannot
hide, however, for what sees me is (like Wordsworth’s cliff) the totality of
the visible, and thus one bears the burden of guilt. Such an intertwining
of guilt, self-consciousness and solitude is expressed in the Rückenfigur.
As a wanderer, his existence recalls the purgatorial lives of Cain, Ahasuerus
and Coleridge’s Mariner. He stands alone in nature, distinct from the
landscape that occupies his gaze. His back is turned from us, as if to hide
his face in shame, and to conceal the front of his body which would be
his nakedness.
A being who sees and is seen, the Rückenfigur mediates the position of the
subject in the landscape. Sensible and sentient, his body exists both as part
of the visible landscape, and as a place within the scene that is inhabited with


  

a touch and a vision like our own. ‘As soon as I see’, writes Merleau-Ponty,
‘it is necessary that vision (as is so well indicated by the double meaning of
the word) be doubled with a complementary vision . . . myself seen from
without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible,
occupied in considering it from a certain spot.’ In Friedrich, we behold pre-
cisely this doubled vision. Yet, how are we situated within this doubling?
Surely the eye that sees the Rückenfigur will also itself be seen by another
gaze. The limits of our own sight are clear enough to us when we encounter
Friedrich’s Rückenfigur. When we beheld the Chasseur in the Forest, the
turned soldier deepened our sense of the narrowness of our experience: we
could not see his eye nor what he saw, the snowy path beyond the turn. Be-
holding the Rückenfigur we become aware that we see only from one point,
while in our existence we are observed from all sides. The gaze that sees the
Rückenfigur turns to watch us as well. It is a gaze that is prior to the eye, a see-
ing to which, as Jacques Lacan says, ‘I am subjected in an original way.’
From this perspective, which constructs us as subjects, our sense of
belatedness vis-à-vis Friedrich’s landscapes emerges within the experience
that we are neither the centre nor the origin of our vision, and that what
we see has already been formed by a gaze prior to our act of seeing. The
Rückenfigur, here as the artist returned to the original moment of his per-
ception of nature, elicits from us an awareness that experience is consti-
tuted retrospectively, as always only a landscape of memory. Indeed the
Rückenfigur itself compromises the fullness of our own experience as
viewers, a fullness idealized in the concept of Erlebniskunst. In analysing
the motivations for the Romantic motif of the halted traveller, Geoffrey
Hartman has argued that the self ’s arrest in nature, and with it the reader/
viewer’s arrest before the work of art, is always linked to an encounter
with an earlier vision, a prior self or prior voice:

In every case . . . there is some confrontation of person with shadow

or self with self. The intense lyricism of the Romantics may well be
related to this confrontation, For the Romantic ‘I’ emerges nostalgi-
cally when certainty and simplicity of self are lost. In a lyric poem it
is clearly not the first-person form that moves us (the poem need not
be in the first person) but rather the I towards which that I reaches.

This retrospective moment may be variously constituted. In Walter Scott

and Ludwig Tieck, for example, it is antiquarian; in Friedrich Hölderlin
and to some extent in Novalis, it is visionary; in Wordsworth and Coleridge,


   

it is, as Hartman puts it, ‘deeply oblique’, embedded in the reading struc-
ture of the lyrical monologue itself. In Friedrich, it occurs not only in the
Rückenfigur’s doubling of vision, but also in the artist’s taste for the
Gothic. A nostalgia for the Middle Ages informs both individual motifs in
Friedrich’s art, such as monks, ruined churches, retable altarpieces and
visionary cathedrals, and also the artist’s whole formal ‘system’, for exam-
ple, his partly archaizing preference for compositional symmetry, which
reoccupies the diagrammatic religious art of the Middle Ages, and his
particularizing painterly manner, which contemporaries like Ramdohr
understood as the conscious imitation of an ‘old German’ style discernible
in Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries.
In a curious canvas from  and now in Frankfurt, Carl Gustav Carus
makes explicit one relation between Romantic historicism and the motif
of the Rückenfigur (illus. ). The sixteenth-century masters Raphael and
Michelangelo, depicted as subjects in the landscape, emblematize the con-
temporary viewer’s belatedness doubly, both as a temporality mediated by
the halted traveller as such, and as a latecoming vis-à-vis artistic tradition.
The two greatest masters of Italian painting may be heroized as quintes-
sential precursors (in German Vorgänger, literally ‘walking before’) of the art
of Carus and his culture, yet as Runge remarked, they belonged precisely

 Carl Gustav Carus, Raphael and Michelangelo, . Freies Deutsches
Hochstift, Frankfurt.


  

to an earlier epoch, one before the advent of landscape; and thus their
portrayal as Romantic Rückenfiguren represents less a continuity with
Rome than a rift between present and past. Friedrich never places his art
so clearly within a grand tradition, yet his Rückenfiguren are meant to convey
a quite specific relation to the past.

Friedrich’s only known explanation of the Rückenfigur motif is recorded

in the memoirs of the Dresden poet and translator Karl Förster. Förster
describes his visit to the artist’s studio in  in the reluctant company
of the Nazarene painter Peter Cornelius, who at the time was widely
regarded as Germany’s greatest master. Friedrich humbly displayed some
canvases to the arrogant Cornelius, while the latter pretended at first not
to remember who exactly Friedrich was. Förster, for his part, admired the
way the artist ‘always knew to place his figures in a meaningful relation to
the landscape’, a relation that Förster interpreted succinctly as the ‘con-
templation of the infinite’. When Friedrich brought forth a painting of
‘two cloaked men embracing each other as they gaze enraptured at a land-
scape with a moon’, however, he offered his own rather different exegesis:
‘“They are plotting demagogic intrigues [demagogische Umtriebe],” said
Friedrich ironically, as if in explanation.’ The landscape thus described
dates from  and hangs now in Dresden (illus. ); the two
Rückenfiguren probably represent, at the left, Friedrich himself and, at the
right, his student August Heinrich. And Friedrich’s phrase ‘demagogic
intrigues’ has a very precise meaning within German politics in the year
of Cornelius’s and Förster’s visit.
‘Demagogue’ was a derogatory term used by conservatives for someone
who espoused the ideal of a unified German state established by constitu-
tion and governed with the consent of its citizens. Liberal nationalism had
emerged in Germany mainly as a consequence of the wars against
Napoleon. The German bourgeoisie, having been mobilized to defeat the
French armies, returned to their variously governed territories with a
strengthened belief in the possibility of national unity. They trusted, too,
that their rulers, the territorial princes and Prussian king under whom
they had fought, would now support them in this goal. One centre of such
nationalist sentiments was the universities. Before  students had organ-
ized themselves regionally, in hard drinking and often brutal fraternities
or Landmannschaften comprised of natives of an individual territorial
principality (such as Saxony, Franconia, Westphalia), After , the stu-
dents returning from the battle-field had lost their strong local allegiances.


   

Inspired by the nationalistic rhetoric of the writer Ernst Moritz Arndt (a

close acquaintance of Friedrich), they banded together in well-behaved
and strongly liberal corporations or ‘German societies’ with names like
Teutonia, Vandalia, Germania and Arminia. Their colours were black, red
and gold; their songs celebrated German unity; and their appearance and
apparel consisted of a short black jacket and shirt with stand-up collar, a
barret, soft-leather shoes (rather than the traditional student footgear of
jack-boots and spurs), bushy beard or side-burns, and long unpowdered
and uncurled hair. This costume, called altdeutsch (‘old German’), was in-
vented by Arndt himself in , and it was believed to imitate the garb of
the townsman in the supposed heroic era of German unity, the late Middle
Ages and Reformation.
The significance of the altdeutsch attire was summarized by the painter,
poet and future revolutionary Harro Harring, who journeyed from
Copenhagen to Dresden in  to study at the Academy and eventually
to join Friedrich’s circle. Harring wrote of his voyage to Germany:

The ship sped there at a remarkable time. What had been strange
for centuries now returned to light; the German had made himself
a jacket like his fathers wore, and he strode in this jacket towards the
future – a future which stretched out magnificently before him,
decorated with all the blessings of peace, rich in promises, and rich
in proud hopes! The German wandered on blood-soaked ground
whose freedom was purchased through the death of thousands of
excellent men, who sacrificed themselves as offering for a
long-yearned-for atonement! The German oaks murmur mysteri-
ously of a wondrous thing, of a powerful age . . .

It was nationalists like these who in  gathered by the hundreds at

the Wartburg Festival in Thuringia to mark the th anniversary of the
Reformation. Dressed in the altdeutsch garb of an imagined lost unity in
order to anticipate a single Germany still ahead, they recuperated the songs
and rituals of the late Middle Ages, celebrating German unity by recollect-
ing a heroic past. And in imitation of Luther’s burning of the papal bulls,
they set fire to ‘un-German’ books and to various tokens of oppressive
princely rule.
Their hopes were soon to be disappointed, however. Fearful of such
agitation, the territorial princes and their conservative allies rejected as
unhistorical the link between the Napoleonic wars and German unification,


  

regarding the former as merely the people’s revolt to restore a previously

legitimate sovereignty, rather than as a mandate for political change.
Regarding liberals ‘rich in proud hopes’ as a threat to aristocratic and
royal privilege, Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia decreed that the struggle
against Napoleon should be termed the ‘War of Liberation’ (Bef-
reiungskrieg), rather than ‘Freedom War’ (Freiheitskrieg), so as to dis-
courage any analogy to the American and French revolutions. In his first
speech to parliament in , Otto von Bismarck was still disputing the
liberal ‘legend’ that the liberation of Prussia from the French was not the
sufficient and final goal of the war of . While the repression of
nationalism began already in , it intensified in , after a theology
student, Karl Ludwig Sand, assassinated the poet and playwright August
Kotzebue, despised by liberals for his frivolous comedies, his enjoyment
of lucrative foreign patronage, his reactionary politics, and his alleged
spying for Russia. Immediately after the murder, Prince Klemens von
Metternich, the conservative Austrian foreign minister and chief architect
of the  Congress of Vienna, appointed a commission to end what it
would call ‘demagogische Umtriebe’. This resulted in the Karlsbad
Decrees of September , which limited freedom of the press, banned
from the schools and universities teachers professing liberal or national-
ist ideas, forbade student fraternities of all kinds and outlawed the alt-
deutsch costume.
Thus in , when Cornelius and Förster were shown Friedrich’s
Two Men Contemplating the Moon, they would have recognized at once the
political message of the picture. The artist and his student stand dressed
in ‘jackets like [their] fathers wore’, flanked to the right by a ruined tree,
perhaps symbolic of the passing old order, and to the left by an evergreen,
symbolizing hope. They gaze into a moonlit landscape, there to discern a
future Germany. Friedrich’s ‘ironical’ use of the phrase demagogische
Umtriebe reflects not only his bitter disillusion following the condemna-
tion of his cause, but also his recognition of the disparity between the
alleged intrigues and their repression by the state. The Rückenfiguren reveal
their demagogy to have been nothing but a passive hope, a faith that the
individual would be spectator to the necessity of historical change, just as
he or she is witness to the constantly changing life of landscape. Interesting
recent work on Friedrich has reminded us that his paintings almost always
depict specifically German landscapes, and that the artist’s rejection of the
Claudian ‘ideal’ landscape, as well as of the new classicizing ‘heroic’ land-
scape of the German Romans Koch and Richter, reflect his political stance.


   

Landscape is for him a mode of auguring a new Germany. And natural

history – that is, the irreversible process legible in the times of day, the
seasons of the year and the geological epochs of the earth (illus.  and
) as recorded in Erdlebenkunst – demonstrates the inevitability of that
historical future. The Rückenfigur belongs partly to this message. After ,
Friedrich generally peoples his landscapes with men and women dressed
in altdeutsch clothes. The retrospective moment articulated by the halted
traveller, which we have analysed in terms of a confrontation of self with
earlier self, has thus a profound historical dimension as well. On the one
hand, the Rückenfigur expresses nostalgia by the historicism of its costume,
which invokes an earlier epoch of political, social and cultural cohesion,
indeed the epoch of the Christian altarpiece and cathedral, whose fragments
order and disorder the present landscape. On the other hand, referring to
the new national ideal, the Rückenfigur transposes the metaphysical yearning
for union with nature into the contemporary political imperative of a
unified state.
However, like all allegories discoverable within Friedrich’s pictures,
such a concrete ideological message belies the complexity of Romantic
art. The historical subject of landscape, by which I mean both the
Rückenfigur as reference to the events of Friedrich’s time, and the histori-
cizing vocabulary (altdeutsch costume, etc.) whereby such events are rep-
resented and understood, is not an interpretative solution to Friedrich’s
art, but only another vehicle for that endless doubling back of meaning
celebrated in Tieck’s Sternbald and mocked in Kleist’s  review. The
impoverishment of history stands emblematized in what is perhaps
Friedrich’s most overtly political canvas, Ulrich von Hutten’s Grave of
–, now in Weimar (illus. ). A man in an altdeutsch barret, uni-
formed as a German soldier, stands contemplating the sarcophagus of the
early sixteenth-century humanist and patriot Ulrich von Hutten. On the
grave are inscribed the names of G.J.D. Scharnhorst, who died a hero in
battle in , along with Joseph von Görres, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the main liberals opposing the restoration. The
painting is an occasional work commemorating at once the th anniver-
sary of the failed German Knights’ Revolt of  against the Roman
Church, which was inspired and supported by Hutten, and the th
anniversary of the French defeat. In  there existed no proper monu-
ment to Hutten, and this failure to honour a patriot of the distant past,
embodied in Friedrich’s canvas by the ruins surrounding the tomb, is
compared to the persecution of the nationalists of the artist’s own time.


  

The patriotic traveller in the dress of the past contemplates here his his-
torical model and himself becomes a figure of neglected history.
Interestingly, Ulrich von Hutten’s own patriotism took a similarly nos-
talgic form. In his writings, he sought to resurrect the vision of Germany
presented by the first-century Roman historian Tacitus in Germania, in
which a courageous Teutonic people, dwelling in northern forests, con-
stantly wars with the Latins. By Hutten’s account, the Roman popes of his
time were the successors of the ancient caesars. When Friedrich and his
culture thus link themselves back to Hutten and his visionary, but ulti-
mately unsuccessful nationalism, they evoke what was already, in the
Renaissance, a proto-historicist evocation. Friedrich’s Rückenfigur thus
embodies not history, but a missed encounter with history. Its project of
reunification takes place always as déjà vu, repeated in the Renaissance; in
the Romantic era; in the nationalistic Friedrich-renascences of the twen-
tieth century, culminating in the Nazi reception of Romantic landscape;
and perhaps even in our time, as the borders of the Germanies unravel.
Friedrich’s Rückenfigur is a traveller in this purgatory, and through its
gaze, which at once constitutes our vision and transforms political action
into internalized Erlebnis, we can discern the troubled and still unstable
relation between art and history. It is discernible in Wanderer above the Sea
of Fog, where the deceased patriot beholds a Germany whose form as yet
can be only imagined, as the product of the heart and of desire, and whose
boundaries are already established as disturbingly infinite. And it arrests
you on the Dresden heath, before the thicket in winter, when what you
thought were just alders in the snow are fragments of your darkest history.


 Entrance to a Chamber in the Convent Church of the Holy Cross near Meissen,
c. . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 Entrance to a Chamber in the Convent Church of the Holy Cross near Meissen,
c. . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.


 Rock Cave, . Pommersches Landesmuseum, Greifswald.


 Quarry near Krippen,  July . Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.


 Oybin Ruins in the Moonlight, c. s. Stiftung Kunstmuseum Moritzburg,
Halle.


 Design for Choir of Marienkirche, Stralsund, .
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.


 Afterword

I wrote the last sentence of the first edition of this book in November 
as East Germans streamed through makeshift openings in the Berlin Wall.
What had seemed unimaginable when I began working on Caspar David
Friedrich was presently occurring: a reunified Germany. I had set out to
suspend the reader between an always already and a not yet, in the ironi-
cally expectant afterwards of the halted traveller, by way of a book with no
preface or conclusion. Now my missed encounter with history was becom-
ing historically passé. So I hastily sealed my argument shut, as if in a time
capsule. Pursued by page proofs crying out for revision, I resolved to
escape, by bike, into the heart of Friedrich country.
Such a trip would have been impossible earlier. Entrance visas to the
German Democratic Republic restricted holders to single destinations
reached by specified major highways. Meandering alone and unmonitored
through the landscape had been as unfeasible as it was illegal, since back
roads – many off-limits even to the GDR’s citizenry – were neither sign-
posted nor indicated on current maps. In early May , equipped with
photocopied pre-war maps, I passed through an abandoned checkpoint
east of Lübeck. I kept close to the Baltic coast, cycling on sandy tracks vir-
tually swallowed by the surrounding dunes. I explored the ancient trade
towns of Wismar, Rostock and Stralsund, now neglected and crumbling.
Ferried out to Rügen, I found the geographic touchstone of Friedrich s art
to be even colder, windier and lonelier than his paintings of it. But
Greifswald, which I first glimpsed against a glowing late-afternoon sky,
beckoned like home. The hotel I’d booked was mysteriously closed; the
manager explained they were ‘spraying’, and left it at that. A curator at the
City Museum kindly took me in. He biked with me to Eldena, talking
about the doldrums of Marxist art history that his job forced him to
pursue. Then I headed south, via Neubrandenburg and Berlin, towards
Dresden.
My outdated map made progress hard. Many of the roads it showed
had disappeared. Some had been resurfaced with concrete slabs stapled


 

together with iron rings – terrible for bicycles but fine for the Soviet tanks
for which they were laid. When a road dissolved into a field or forest, I
simply took my bearings and pressed on, pushing my bike until the track
materialized again. Thus I entered villages from directions odd even to
the natives. I arrived in Dresden much delayed. After visiting Friedrich’s
Trees and Bushes (illus. ), I cycled out to the actual Dresden Heath hop-
ing to feel myself ‘placed before a thicket’. Halting at random, I pushed
my way through some bushes, became tangled in thorns, briefly lost my
way, and eventually retreated only to find that my bicycle, which I’d left
on the roadside unlocked and laden with my belongings, had been stolen.
In this way I became indeed a halted traveller on the heath.
Friedrich country itself seemed stalled. Compared to the West, every-
thing looked antiquated, forlorn and obsolete. Birdsong, which in the
other Germany had been drowned out by zooming cars, greeted me as I
crossed the empty checkpoint near Lübeck. And while the brick facades
of Stralsund’s historic harbour were visibly collapsing, they had not yet
been replaced by modern facsimiles, as they would have been in the West.
But now this time capsule had been opened. The Soviet-style summer
resorts along the Baltic seemed abandoned not just because I passed
through them in early spring. Their day was now over, their clientele – the
elite nomenklatura – now disempowered. In Neubrandenburg and Berlin I
passed hobby stores liquidating their stock. As a shopkeeper reasoned
while selling me his last model train, with so much new to do, his cus-
tomers would surely give up their old pursuits. The life to come was still
unknown, but in the meantime the always already had to be discarded for
a future not yet arrived.
You are afterwards: that had been this book’s first thought. Indi-
vidually hailed by the picture, you arrive in the dead of winter, after all
signs of life have vanished save the one: what you see was already seen.
Your belatedness deepens as you revert to the initial traveller on the heath
only then to discover that he, the artist Friedrich, had already viewed the
scene in retrospect, as a memory brought back from the heath. Moreover,
what he remembered – lived experience – had been an intuition of time
passing, a perception of not being present to experience, hence the strange
fixation on nothing. Through a present-day experience of Friedrich’s
picture, I tried to find my way into history, to the historical moment that
made the artist and that the artist made, back even to the moment when
art becomes the history of art, to the turning-point – theorized by Hegel
and portrayed by Friedrich – in which art becomes a thing of the past. I


 

wanted to discover these histories not in the past or even in the present
but in a future ‘now’ when, moving forward in time, we find ourselves fac-
ing backwards.
I began to write about Friedrich in , when I was an undergradu-
ate at Yale. My interest was literary. I sought to describe experience by
describing a picture – I thought it could be anybody’s picture – of person-
al experience. This experiment, which I repeated while studying English
at Cambridge in , brought me to history: I took up art history as a
result, effectively as the heuristic consequence of my experience of
Friedrich’s Early Snow (illus. ). The picture’s earliness revealed in me a
belatedness that had to be explained. By the time I wrote the opening sen-
tence of the present book in , I had begun to internalize art history’s
disciplinary routines; according to these, the present is explained by the
past and not the reverse. I therefore tried to restage my earlier, more
immediate encounter. I borrowed from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le
labyrinthe () the insistent ‘you’, imagining it might serve as a rough
grammatical analogy to the Rückenfigur’s mode of address. Just as
Friedrich’s turned traveller halts beholders with the possibility that they
are already seen by an anterior gaze, so too the book’s ‘you’ hails readers
presently only then to expose them to a prior self. I hoped to allow the
‘you’ who arrives always afterwards to be seen and foreseen by an ‘I’ look-
ing out from the past. Also, I wanted to demonstrate that history need not
be the starting point for interpretation (a stance that came naturally to me
in Cambridge through the exercise of ‘practical criticism’), but that it
could be discovered as a dimension arising powerfully within interpreta-
tion and as a moment inherent in experience itself. In other words, the
subjective encounter with Friedrich’s art contained the historical impulse,
an impulse which – historicized – had it origins in Friedrich’s culture.
With his apocalyptic expectations and his correct premonition that he
would fit better in our time than in his own, Friedrich seemed to meet the
retrogressive direction of afterwardsness (the present making sense of the
past) with a mysterious, complementary, progressive movement from the
past. In this future-oriented movement, the other (the past, the parent)
sends an enigmatic message to the individual in question (the present, the
child). How does afterwardsness look now, afterwards? Certainly
Friedrich has come to seem even more contemporary in the twenty years
since I finished this book. The painter’s increasing relevance rests on his
exposure in high-profile public exhibitions and on a certain crucial expo-
sition, which understands him to be a watershed figure predicting our own


 

modernity. Friedrich’s relevance also rests on what contemporary artists

have made of him, and what their critics make of his influence. Friedrich
has become totemic not only for German artists, such as Gerhard Richter,
Anselm Keifer and Andreas Gursky, who grapple with their cultural heri-
tage through him. He looms large whenever artists push the image to its
extreme. Whenever imagery expands hyperbolically, claiming to picture
everything, whenever imagery contracts to the point of extinction, and
especially whenever icon and iconoclasm – having pictures and having
done with pictures – violently clash, then Friedrich looms large.
Twenty years of scholarship have sharpened our picture of Friedrich’s
own methods and intentions. Viewers had long admired a certain trans-
parency this artist achieved in paint, the sense that, rather than beholding
pigments applied to canvas and illuminated from our side of the picture
plane, we observe light radiating out from the depicted landscape, through
the paint with which it is depicted. Exhibitions featuring the one surviv-
ing transparency by Friedrich (a translucent sheet, now in Kassel, showing
on the recto a mountainous river landscape in the morning and, on the
verso, that same landscape at night) revealed this artist’s technical strug-
gle with painting’s materiality, his effort, in his own words, ‘to annul the
materiality of colour’. More intriguing still, an analysis by Aviva Burnstock
of Friedrich’s paints showed his unusual predilection for smalt-based pig-
ments. A by-product of porcelain production, smalt is a glass-like substance
that, when applied thinly or with stippled brushstrokes, heightens the
light-suffusing quality of the paint surface. What I tried to describe as the
subjective focus of Friedrich’s pictures, the sense, dramatized in Winter
Landscape with Church (illus. ), that the ultimate subject of landscape lies
in ourselves, indeed is ourselves, turns out to be an effect grounded in the
base materials with which this artist experiments.
In this book I tried to insist – from the very first paragraph – that
Friedrich’s art depended on its felt foundation in empirical observation.
The thicket (illus. ), I argued, looked like the experience of a thicket not
because it was subjectively coloured, but because, in the particular signa-
ture of its branches, it indexed natural objects directly observed and
sketched. Our feeling of arriving afterwards, as well as the slippage from
symbol to allegory that belatedness occasions, rested on a kernel of percep-
tual immediacy contained in Friedrich’s sketches: witness the neutrally-
rendered scythe at the base of an otherwise clichèd, sentimental drawing
(illus. ). In their studies of the topographies of the painter’s art, Karl-
Ludwig Hoch and Herrmann Zschoche have made this empirical core


 

more vivid than ever. Pursuing Friedrich’s travels around Rügen and
through the mountains of Saxony and Bohemia, they have accessed the
places that Friedrich’s paintings themselves belatedly revisit. Comple-
menting this developing picture of the real, concrete and singular things
to which the artist’s imagery points is a new acknowledgement of the role
of copies, variants and repetitions in his work. A faithful copy of the
London Winter Landscape with Church (illus. ) hangs in the Museum of
Art and Culture in Dortmund, and there exists a rather weak imitation of
it by Friedrich’s student Karl Wilhelm Lieber, as well as an aquatint by
Johann Jacob Wagner. The Cross on the Baltic (illus. ) exists in no less
than four extant versions, three probably by students or imitators, while
Friedrich is recorded by Johan Christian Dahl to have produced, on com-
mission, replicas of his well-known Two Men Contemplating the Moon
(illus. ). This would all seem to contradict this artist’s near-religious
insistence on the individualism, or Eigentümlichkeit, of his person and his
art. For if the painter, according to Friedrich, paints what lies inside him-
self, if each painting is the unique concretion of an image-making process
irreducibly his own, then what are we to make of the quasi-mechanical
process that duplication requires?
Virtually every detail in his canvases replicates studies taken from
nature. And all the synthesizing work that painting performs in creating
nature anew condenses in an emblem not of immediate original experi-
ence but of its monstrous double: the eternal return of the same. With the
Rückenfigur, the artist announces that what I see is what it already sees
and, further, that what it sees is its having been seen by a gaze antecedent
to it. Far transcending the ‘monotony’ faulted in him by critics of his day,
repetition is the master narrative of Friedrich’s art, the matrix through
which something, anything (a thing, a person) becomes for him a subject.
Consider the vicissitudes of the study Friedrich made of an arched door-
way observed from an interior space (illus. ). Executed in watercolour
over pencil, the sheet was probably made on the spot in the Convent
Church of the Holy Cross near Meissen. That this is not yet a finished
work is obvious from the colour tests on the margins. Yet in the way he
attends to his motif, Friedrich already looks forward, via the sketch, to its
future use.
Centred on a doorway that opens to a courtyard or passageway, the
sheet evokes the central figure of Romantic interiority: the open window.
Here the opening is small relative to the interior, and the view of it,
reached by way of a difficult upward passage, is frustratingly random and


 

 Woman Seated

on a Rock and
Study of a Scythe,
. Kunsthalle,
Mannheim.

unremarkable: weedy bushes to the left, a bit of ground and a wall with
occluded openings. Friedrich captures a relationship among three spaces:
a bare, shadowy, cave-like inside in which he stands, a sunlit outdoors he
can barely see and an intervening passage, at least twice as deep as the
door is wide, through which the sketch’s light derives. Again, the artist
knows what he will want from this sketch in future moments, when he will
turn retrospectively to it. He knows he will want the outline of everything
within this eerily vacuous scene, even the picture of the vacuum taken
here, quasi-photographically: the content and the image of that content
which will someday come about. Everything already matters, not just the
precise course of bricks that make the arch but their place within the pic-
torial field (a field the exact boundaries of which Friedrich also already
delimits by reserving a frame of unpainted paper around it). Even the


 

spotting on the wall, those stray patches (or are they shadows, stains, or
spectors?) made yet more random by the colour trials in the margins: even
they get meticulously outlined, reinforced with hatching, and modulated
with wash. In short, whatever occurs within this snapshot of visual dep-
rivation becomes insistently visible.
This insistence, the ineluctable demand that the visible makes on its
own behalf, gets acted out in the pictures generated by the sketch. In a
canvas dating from the s, Friedrich intensifies the contrast between
inside and outside by radically reducing the picture’s economy of light
(illus. ). Whereas in the watercolour, sunlight floods the whole interi-
or from the space between the entrance and the second wall further back,
now an intense illumination streams through the window in the court-
yard’s far side, vainly struggling to penetrate from there the enveloping
darkness of the foreground. Too dark effectively to reproduce in print,
and difficult even in the original to behold, Friedrich’s canvas turns the
interior into a subterranean cave, with light streaming not merely from
outside its world, but also from above. In a remarkable dissertation,
Catherine Clinger has explored Friedrich’s fascination with underground
worlds. Through his repeated portraits of caves and subterranean cran-
nies, and through repeated references, Clinger finds in Friedrich a fasci-
nation with the mysteries and practices of mining – she correctly iden-
tifies the built structure of Hut in the Snow (illus. ) as an entrance to a
shaft mine. The artist conjures an image of internal space, of psychic and
physical interiority, that rivals the above-ground immensities he also pic-
tures as mountains, valleys, sea and sky (illus. , , ). In his Entrance
to a Chamber (illus. , ), Friedrich makes us prisoners of that other
space. All we see of the upper world is a bar-blocked sky. Yet as in his
other dark paintings, and as in the shadowed zones within his paintings
(most famously in the shadowy foreground of Cross in the Mountains
(illus. ), which the enlightened critic Ramdohr so detested), the painter
also retains an entire world right there. As our eyes grow accustomed to
the dark, we perceive all those patches that his sketch from nature origi-
nally fixed.
In the movement from sketch to painting, everything may be different.
This difference may reflect an absolute difference between inside and out,
light and dark, body and soul. Yet everything is also completely the same.
Late in Friedrich’s oeuvre the same returns again (illus. ). The intense-
ly moving sepia in the Winterstein collection restores an equilibrium
between light and shadow, interior and out-of-doors, while also retaining


 

 Entrance to a Chamber in the Convent Church of the Holy Cross near Meissen,
c. –, sepia, Sammlung Winterstein, Munich.

the oil painting’s plot about entrapment and yearning for release. It is as
if not only the viewer but Friedrich himself has finally accustomed him-
self to this inside, this prison-house of being into which we have been
thrown. For only now do those patches reveal the grounds of their insis-
tence as the dim but urgent claim upon the mind of that which is.
Friedrich’s sepia came to Harvard in  as part of an exhibition of
drawings from the ‘Age of Goethe’. Able to live with the work and to feel
its effects on me slowly change, I revised my views about the temporal
structure of Friedrich’s art. Comparing the sepia to the original sketch,


 

 Letter to Louise Seidler,  May . Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden.

observing how everything is at once completely different and completely

the same, I realized that what I thought were memories – lived experience
now slipped into the past – were rather more like repetitions. Unlike rec-
ollections, which derive from initial impressions, repetitions elude any
reference to a beginning. That’s what distinguishes déjà vu from memory:
a present perception is haunted not by an actual past that it evokes but by
a sense occurring only now that this has happened before or will happen
again or has happened in an infinite recurrence of the same. When
Friedrich sketched the entranceway from life, he did so in the full recog-
nition that what he captured was not his experience then and there. True,
something of that experience has been deposited on the sheet. This
includes the experience of making (hence the colour trials). But what con-
cerns the artist is something else, something he distils into that outline of
all things before him: that virtually indexical imprint of the real. So when
that imprint returns exactly, when, in the canvas and sepia, it is the iden-
tical underlying the different, it does so not as memory, since the experi-
ence that might be remembered either has not yet occurred or was of no


 

consequence. Through repeating the motif exactly in completely differ-

ent terms, Friedrich points to something underneath experience itself: a
constancy afterwards perceived but never presently occurring, an enig-
matic message from the past that only surfaces in the future, in timeless –
because identical – repetitions of the same.
Repainting the one picture of a bare, below-ground chamber,
Friedrich returns to the primal scene of picture-making itself. Plato, in
the allegory of the cave, imagined lived experience unfolding inside such
a cavern, with light seeping in from a hidden beyond. What the cave-
dweller perceives as ‘things’ turn out to be but empty shadows cast by a
real reality existing outside, in the sun-drenched world of the Ideas. On
this model, the phenomenon itself, the elemental content of sense expe-
rience, derives not from a personal, historic or biological past, but from
eternal pre-existent truth. Insubstantial, deceptive and belated, the phe-
nomenon is – in Plato’s long-lived diatribe – an idol. Consider, then,
Friedrich’s peculiar insistence on outlining, precisely as they ‘are’, the
blotches on the chamber’s walls, things that could just as well be shad-
ows, spots and floaters in the eye, random, accidental daubs of paint. In
antiquity, and throughout art theory since the Renaissance, such nebu-
lous spots were the recommended starting point for artistic imagination.

 Ruins of the Choir of Oybin Monastery,  July . Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 

Observing chance stains on a wall, painters practised seeing and depict-

ing things in them that are not there: faces, animals and gods that the
mind, through its creative capacity, can imagine and represent.
Friedrich’s drawing and the painting made after it seem to work in the
opposite direction, away from the imagination back to the phenomenon,
to the bare and disenchanted idol.
Like all Romantics, Friedrich was burdened by the past, by the always
already of temporal and historical experience. In him life, as well as art,
recedes generally into the past. But because of his specific confessional
identity, this painter also shouldered a particular historical inheritance,
one with deep roots in the Judeo-Christian past and with special relevance
today. After I completed this book, I began to trace the prehistory of
Friedrich’s art back to the image wars of sixteenth-century Germany. A
devoutly Protestant painter, Friedrich was a distant heir to the iconoclasts
of the Reformation, who vilified church pictures as wasteful, scandalous
idols that had to be eliminated from religion. His endeavour to void his
canvas of all subjects except the one – the believer or Christian subject
vis-à-vis the hidden object of belief – obeys this pious imperative to
negate. Friedrich’s Protestantism is more confessionally specific than this,
however. His effort to create landscape painting as a new kind of religious
icon, one resolutely in and of the secular world yet reaching beyond, tran-
scendently, derives from the specifically Lutheran settlement on images.
Although Luther repudiated church pictures as instruments of salvation,
he condemned – more vehemently – violent iconoclasts, observing that
their fanatic war against images made them the idolaters.
In The Reformation of the Image, I analysed church cleansing’s artistic
aftermath: visually self-effacing images that remained – quite unexpect-
edly – central to the new religion of the word. When Friedrich set out to
redesign actual church space, as he did in his  drawings for a pro-
posed but never-executed renovation of the Marienkirche in Stralsund,
he imagined an image-free interior reduced to its functional parts (altar,
font and pulpit) and sanctified only through the activities of the preach-
er and his flock. For as Lutherans had it, ‘where preaching and sacrament,
there church.’ But Friedrich remained also powerfully drawn to the
absences iconoclasm engendered. In Ulrich von Hutten’s Grave, and more
mysteriously in the watercolour on which that canvas is based, the
painter explores images emerging in their ruin (illus. ). Stripped of all
ornaments and effigies, the disintegrating edifice that had been ‘church’
traces new icons against the sky. The trefoil lancet windows, in their


 

anthropomorphic shape, resemble the elongated forms of angels or of saints.

The image comes about in the afterwards of its negation, in the rearward
glance that sees you still.


   

The main general work on Caspar David Friedrich is Helmut Börsch-Supan and
Karl Wilhelm Jähnig, Caspar David Friedrich: Getmälde, Druckgraphik und bild-
mässige Zeichnungen (Munich, ), which contains a short biography of the
artist, an extensive bibliography of critical responses to his work (many reprint-
ed in full), and a complete catalogue raisonné of the paintings, prints and major
graphic works. Friedrich’s drawings are catalogued in Sigrid Hinz, ‘Caspar
David Friedrich als Zeichner: Ein Beitrag zur stilistischen Entwicklung der
Zeichnungen und ihrer Bedeutung für die Datierung der Gemälde’ (Ph.D
dissertation, Greifswald, ), and are reprinted in Marianne Bernhard, ed.,
Caspar David Friedrich: Das gesamte graphische Werke (Herrsching, n. d.).
Friedrich’s writings, along with a selection of relevant documents by the artist’s
contemporaries, are gathered most recently in Sigrid Hinz, Caspar David Friedrich
in Briefen und Bekenntnissen (Munich, ); see also Gertrude Fiege, Caspar
David Friedrich in Selbstzeugnisse und Bilddokumente (Reinbek bei Hamburg, ),
and, for additional material, Karl-Ludwig Hoch, Caspar David Friedrich:
Unbekannte Dokumente seines Lebens (Dresden, ). Indispensable for Friedrich’s
early training and career is Werner Sumowski, Caspar David Friedrich–Studien
(Wiesbaden, ), which also includes an extensive bibliography; useful, too, is
the catalogue for the great  Hamburg Kunsthalle exhibition, Caspar David
Friedrich ‒, ed. Werner Hofmann (Munich, ).

 : Romanticizing the World

 From the Dresden Heath
For a discussion of the two canvases From the Dresden Heath, see Börsch-Supan
and Jähnig, Friedrich, pp. –; Caspar David Friedrich ‒, ed. Hof-
mann, p. ; Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Deutsche
Romantiker: Bildthemen der Zeit von ‒, ed. Christoph Heilmann, exh.
cat. (Munich, ), pp. –; Christoph Heilmann, Caspar David Friedrich:
 Gemälde. Ausstellung anlässlich einer Neuerwerbung des Ernst voiz Siemens-
Kunstfonds für die Neue Pinakothek München (Munich, ); and Hamburg,
Kunsthalle, Luther und die Folgen für die Kunst, ed. Werner Hofmann (Munich,
), cat. no. –.
For a discussion of the phrase naer het leven, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of
Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, ), pp. –. The
aesthetic foundation and historical origins of Erlebniskunst is outlined in Hans-
Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik,
rd rev. ed. (Tübingen, ), pp. –.


   

 The Subject of Landscape

Carl Gustav Carus’s anecdote about Friedrich’s inverted canvas appears first in his
Lebenserinnerungen und Denkwürdigkeiten (Leipzig, –), , p. , excerpted
in Hinz (), p. .
Friedrich’s interpretation of Swans in the Rushes appears in Biographische und
literarische Skizzen aus dem Leben und der Zeit Karl Försters, ed. L. Förster, reprint-
ed Hinz, p. .
Landscape with Oaks and Hunter, Winter Landscape and Winter Landscape with
Church are identified as belonging to a series in Börsch-Supan and Jähnig,
Friedrich, pp. –, on the basis of a letter from Gustav Heinrich Naeke to Dr
Ludwig Puttrich dated  June , which Börsch-Supan and Jähnig reproduce
(pp. –). The attribution of the London Winter Landscape with Church as an
original Friedrich, and the Dortmund version as a copy, is argued convincingly
in John Leighton, Anthony Reeve and Aviva Burnstock, ‘A “Winter Landscape”
by Caspar David Friedrich’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin,  (), pp. –
. My quotation from John Clare is taken from ‘A Vision’ of .

 Romanticism
My reading of the equivocal nature of the term ‘Romanticism’ is indebted to
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The
Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cherly
Lester (Albany, NY, ), especially pp. – and –. For a general introduc-
tion to the problem, see R. Immerwahr, ‘The word romantisch and its History’,
The Romantic Period in Germany: Essays by the Members of the London University
Institute of German Studies, ed. Siegbert Prawer (New York, ). An early
attempt to come to terms with the historiographical nebulousness of the term is
Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’, Proceedings of
the Modern Language Association,  (), pp. –; this essay, along with
a number of other definitions of Romanticism, is usefully collected in Robert
F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe, eds, Romanticism: Points of View, nd ed.
(Detroit, MI, ). See also the anthologies by David Thornburn and Geoffrey
Hartman, eds, Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities (Ithaca, NY, ) and
by Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New
York, ).
The most perceptive analysis of the metaphor of the book in Romanticism is
Hans Blumenberg’s chapter, ‘Die Welt muss romantisirt werden’, in his Die
Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt, ), pp. –, which stands behind my read-
ing of Novalis and Schlegel. Other useful studies on the metaphor of the world
as book are, first and foremost, Ernst Robert Curtius, ‘The Book as Symbol’, in
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, NJ, ), pp. –; Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending:
Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, ); Jacques Derrida, ‘Edmund Jabès
and the Question of the Book’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago, ), pp. –; and Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book: A
Study of Modern Fiction, nd ed. (London, ). For an attempt to trace one
afterlife of the Romantic idea of the book in twentieth-century painting, see my

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own ‘Paul Klee and the Image of the Book’, in Rainer Crone and Joseph Leo
Koerner, Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign (New York, ).
Ludwig Tieck’s remark about Friedrich and Romantic philosophy is quoted
in Paul Kluckhohn, Charakteristiken: Die Romantiker in Selbstzeugnissen und
Äusserungen ihrer Zeitgenossen (Stuttgart, ), p. . For Friedrich Schlegel’s
Athenaeum fragments, I have used throughout the following recent edition:
Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich, ). The standard criti-
cal edition of Novalis is Novalis: Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhorn and R. Samuel,
 vols (Stuttgart, –).
The fragment on ‘romantization’ appears in Novalis: Schriften, , p. ;
Friedrich Schlegel’s letter to Novalis on the new Bible, of  October , also
appears in Schriften, , p.  ff; and Novalis’s response,  November , in
Schriften, , p.  ff. Novalis’s comment on the object as temple appears in his
Vermischte Bermerkungen (), no.  (Schriften, ‒VI, no. ); and his defini-
tion of Romanticism as distance in his Allgemeinen Brouillon (–), Schriften,
‒IX, no. .

 : Art as Religion

 The Non-Contemporaneity of the Contemporary
There is a large literature on Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains and the contro-
versy it sparked. For a general account, in English, see William Vaughan, German
Romantic Painting (New Haven, CT, ), pp. –; useful summaries of the
problem, along with bibliography, are given in Börsch-Supan and Jähnig,
Friedrich, cat. no.  and Caspar David Friedrich –, ed. Hofmann, pp.
–. More specialized readings are offered by Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, ‘Stu-
dien zur Rezeption der deutschen romantischen Malerei in Kunstliteratur und
Kunstgeschichte’ (Ph.D dissertation, Munich, ), pp. –; Norbert
Schneider, ‘Natur und Religiosität in der deutschen Frühromantik – zu Caspar
David Friedrichs Tetschen Altar’, in Berthold Hinz et al., Bürgerliche Revolution
und Romantik: Natur und Gesellschaft bei Caspar David Friedrich (Giessen, ),
pp. –; Eva Reitharovà and Werner Sumowski, ‘Beiträge zu Caspar David
Friedrich’, Pantheon,  (), pp. –; Donat de Chapeaurouge, ‘Bemerkun-
gen zu Caspar David Friedrichs Tetschener Altar’, Pantheon,  (), pp. –;
Karl-Ludwig Hoch, ‘Der sogennante Tetschener Altar Caspar David Friedrichs’,
Pantheon,  (), pp. –; Werner Hofmann, ‘Caspar David Friedrichs
“Tetschen Altar” und die Tradition der protestantischen Frömmigkeit’, Idea.
Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle,  (), pp. –; and Timothy Mitchell,
‘What Mad Pride: Tradition and Innovation in the Ramdohrstreit’, Art History,
 (), pp. –.
Ramdohr’s original review was published in Zeitung für die elegante Welt, 
– (– January ), pp.  ff,  ff,  ff and  ff, and is reprinted in
Hinz (), pp. –; his response to his critics appeared as ‘Über kritischen
Despotismus und künstlerische Originalität’, in Zeitung für dir elegante Welt,
– ( and  March ), pp.  ff and , reprinted in Hinz, pp. –.
Gerhard von Kügelgen’s defence, entitled ‘Bemerkungen eines Künstlers über
die Kritik des Kammerherrn von Ramdohr, ein von Herrn Friedrich ausgestelltes

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Bildbetreffend’, appeared first in Zeitung für dir elegante Welt,  ( March ),
pp.  ff, reprinted in Hinz, pp. –. An abridged (and sometimes faulty)
translation of Ramdohr and Kügelgen’s texts is given in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt,
ed., The Triumph of Art for the Public –: The Emerging Role of Exhibi-
tions and Critics (Princeton, ), pp. –. Ferdinand Hartmann’s defence
appeared as ‘Über Kunstaustellungen und Kunstkritik’, Phoebus, ein Journal
für die Kunst, ed. Heinrich von Kleist (), reprinted in Hinz, pp. –.
Christian August Semler’s essay ‘Über einige Landschaften des Malers Friedrich
in Dresden’ appeared in Journal des Luxus und der Moden (), pp. –, and
his ‘Beilage zu einem Briefe über Friedrichs Landschaften’ in Zeitung für die
elegante Welt (), pp. –; both reprinted in Börsch-Supan and Jähnig,
Friedrich, pp. –.
Johann Jacob O. A. Rühle von Lilienstern’s account appears as Letter  (
March ) of his Reise mit der Armee im Jahre  (Rudolstadt, ), reprint-
ed in Hinz, pp. –. Maria Helene von Kügelgen’s account appears in Ein
Lebensbild in Briefe (Leipzig, ), p. . The letters of Countess Theresia
Thun-Hohenstein and her mother were discovered by Eva Reitharovà and pub-
lished in the article ‘Beiträge zu Caspar David Friedrich’, co-authored by
Sumowski, and cited above.
For an analysis of the possible relation between Cross in the Mountains and
Gustav IV Adolf, see Gerhard Eimer, Zur Dialektik des Glaubens bei Caspar
David Friedrich (Frankfurt, ), pp. ‒ and passim. My quotation from
Zinzendorf is taken from his Eine Sammlung offentlicher Reden (Nicolaus Ludwig
von Zinzendorf, Hauptschriften, ed. Erich Beyreuther and Gerhard Meyer
(Hildesheim, –), -IV, p. ), as quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian
Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, , Christian Doctrine and
Modern Culture (since ) (Chicago, ), p. . The best general introduc-
tion to the religious climate in Germany at  is still Franz Schnabel’s volume
on Die Religiösen Kräfte in his monumental Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehn-
ten Jahrhundert,  vols (Freiburg, , reprinted Munich, ), , especially
pp. –.
The photograph of Cross in the Mountains in a bedroom in the Tetschen
Castle was published in Die Zeit,  December , and is reproduced in Hoch,
‘Der sogennate Tetschener Altar’, p. . Philipp Otto Runge’s remarks on
Raphael’s Sistine Madonna appear in a letter to his brother Daniel of  March
, and in an unpublished essay of the same year, both reprinted in Runge,
Briefe and Schriften, ed. Peter Betthausen (Munich, ), pp.  and  respec-
tively. Runge’s reading of Raphael’s canvas as an instance of secularization is
taken up again by Walter Benjamin in ‘Das Kunstwerk in Zeitalter seiner tech-
nischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (second version, ), Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser,  vols (Frankfurt, ), ,
p.  n. , who follows Hubert Grimm, ‘Das Rätsel der Sixtinischen Madonna’,
Zeitschrift für den bildende Kunst,  (), pp. –. The literature on Runge’s
Morning is vast and complex; the best overview is Jörg Traeger, Phillipp Otto
Runge und sein Werk: Monographie und kritischer Katalogue (Munich, ), pp. 
– and cat. no. .
The function and audience of German literary journals and reading clubs
in  are discussed in Henri Brunswig, Enlightenment and Romanticism in

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Eighteenth-Century Prussia, trans. Frank Jellinek (Chicago, ), pp. –.

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck’s Herzensergiessungen eines
kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (; Stuttgart, ) is available in English as
Confessions from the Heart of an Art Loving Friar, trans. Mary Hurst Schubert,
in Confessions and Fantasies (University Park, PA, ); the reference to
Ramdohr appears in the introductory remarks ‘To the Reader’.
On the concept of Eigentümlichkeit in Friedrich and his culture, see Klaus
Lankheit, ‘Caspar David Friedrich und der Neuprotestantismus’, Deutsche Viertel-
jahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte,  (), pp. –;
Schleiermacher’s comment in the Monologen is quoted in Lankheit, p.  n.; see
also Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John
Oman (New York, ), pp. –. Friedrich’s undated fragment ‘Über Kunst
und Kunstgeist’ was among the artist’s literary remains preserved by Johann
Christian Claussen Dahl; it is published in Hinz (), pp. –.
The historicism of Friedrich’s defenders is stressed by Timothy Mitchell,
‘What Mad Pride’, cited above. For an excellent account of the discipline of art
history, in relation to historicism, see Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?
(Munich, ); see also Dieter Jähnig, Welt-Geschichte: Kunst-Geschichte. Zum
Verhältnis von Vergangenheitserkenntnis und Veränderung (Cologne, ). Justus
Möser’s Osnabruck History is collected in Justus Mösers sämtliche Werke:
Historisch kritische Ausgabe, ed. Eberhard Crusius et al.,  vols (Oldenburg, –
present), vols  and . On the relation between Möser’s historicistic concept
of the state and the concept of Eigentum, see Mac Walker, German Home Towns:
Community, State and General Estate – (Ithaca, NY, ), pp. –
and passim; see also Brunswig, Enlightenment, pp. –; and Jonathan B. Knudsen,
Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
Friedrich Schlegel’s famous statement about poetry as ‘republican speech’
appears as Kritische Fragment,  in Kritische Schriften, ed. Rasch, p. , and is
discussed in Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter
(Ithaca, NY, ), pp. –; Kant’s statement on genius occurs in §  (‘On
Methodology Concerning Taste’) of the Critique of Judgment (), trans.
Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN, ), p. ; Schlegel’s statement on criti-
cism as art appears as Kritische Fragment,  in Schriften, p. . For an excellent
account of the ‘subjectivisation of aesthetics’ in Kant and the Romantics, see
Gadamer, Wahrheit and Methode, pp. –. Novalis’s statement about the reader
as ‘erweitete Autor’ is discussed in Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in
der deutschen Romantik, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann and Schweppen-
häuser, I, p. .
Carus’s account of Friedrich’s transformation of landscape appears in the
preface to Caspar David Friedrich, der Landschaftsmaler–Zu seinem Gedächtnis,
nebst Fragmenten aus seinem nachglassenen Papieren (Dresden, ), reprinted in
Hinz, pp. –. The negative notice on Dresden landscape painting appeared
in Zeitung für die elegante Welt (), p. , excerpted in Börsch-Supan and
Jähnig, Friedrich, p. . Reviews of the  Berlin exhibition are also listed and
summarized there (p. ). For full discussion of Friedrich’s reception, and of
its various political circumstances, see Roswitha Mattausch, ‘Rezeption und
Transformation im . Jahrhundert’, Klaus Wolbert, ‘“Deutsche Innerlichkeit”:
Die Wiederentdeckung im deutschen Imperialismus’, and Bernard Hinz, ‘Die

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Mobilisierung im deutschen Faschismus’, all in Caspar David Friedrich und die

deutsche Nachwelt: Aspekte zum Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, ed. Werner
Hofmann (Frankfurt, ), pp. –. The review from  appeared in Die
Kunst,  (), p. , as quoted in Hinz, ‘Mobilisierung’, p.  n.. Johann
Christian Claussen Dahl’s statement was first quoted in Andreas Aubert, Kunst
und Künstler,  (), p.  and reprinted in Hinz (), p. .
Friedrich’s statements of c.  on his art and its relation to contemporary
tastes appear in a text entitled ‘Äusserung bei Betrachtung einer Sammlung
von Gemälden von grösstenteils noch lebenden und unlängst verstorbenen
Künstlern’. It was published posthumously by Carus as part of his Caspar David
Friedrich, der Landschaftsmalter, cited above, and is reprinted in Hinz (); the
passages I have quoted above appear, in order, in Hinz, pp. ,  and .
The anecdote of skating is first recorded in the anonymous ‘Gespräch über
die Kunstausstellung in Dresden’, Der Freimüthige und Ernst und Scherz,  (),
pp. – and reprinted in Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, Friedrich, p. .

 Sentimentalism
Friedrich’s early graphic manner is discussed in Sumowski, Friedrich-Studien,
pp. – and in Jens Christian Jensen, Caspar David Friedrich: Leben und Werk,
nd rev. ed. (Cologne, ), p. . Jensen offers compelling readings of most of
Friedrich’s self-portraits (pp. –). On the Berlin Self-portrait, see Sumowski,
p. , who suggests the allusion to portrait bust, and Börsch-Supan and Jähnig
(Friedrich, cat. no. ), who argue for a reference to a monk’s habit. Goethe’s
definition of Classic versus Romantic art is quoted in Mario Praz, The Romantic
Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, nd rev. ed. (Oxford, ), p. . David d’Anger’s
statement is quoted in Carus, Lebenserinnungen, , p. ; Ferdinand Hartman’s
remark about Friedrich’s beard is recorded by Wilhelmine Bardua in a memoir
published posthumously as Jugendleben der Malerin Caroline Bardua, ed. W.
Schwarz (Breslau, ), pp. –, and reprinted in Hinz, p. ; Wilhelm von
Kügelgen’s anecdote about Friedrich’s cloak appears in his Jugenderinnungen
eines alten Mannes (Ebenhausen, ), and is quoted in Jensen, Friedrich, p. .
Schelling’s definition of the subjective character of landscape painting appears
in Philosophie der Kunst (–), in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K.F.A. Schelling, 
vols (Stuttgart, –), –, p. ; Friedrich’s famous statement on the sub-
jectivity of art is reprinted in Hinz (), p. .
On the city of Greifswald, see J. Ziegler, Geschichte der Stadt Greifswald
(Griefswald, ). Friedrich’s early biography and career are recounted in Her-
bert von Einem, Caspar David Friedrich, rd rev. ed. (Berlin, ), pp. –;
and Sumowski, Friedrich-Studien, pp. –. Quistorp’s letter to Runge (dated 
August ) is quoted in Sumowski, p. . Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten’s
Jucunde is published in Dichtungen,  vols (Griefswald, ), I, p. . Helmut
Börsch-Supan’s discussion of the pivotal role of Friedrich’s Rugen sketches on
the artist’s overall development appears as Die Bildgestaltung bei Caspar David
Friedrich (Ph.D dissertation, Munich, ), pp. –.
On the organization of the Copenhagen Academy, see F. Mendahl and P.
Johansen, Det kongelige Akademi for de skjøne Kunster – (Copenhagen,
), as well as Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr, Studien zur Kenntnis der

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schönen Natur, der schönen Künste, der Sitten und der Staatsverferassung auf einer Reise
nach Dänemark (Hanover, ), I, p.  ff. Runge’s comments on the Academy
appear in a letter of  February to his brother Daniel, published in Briefe und
Schriften, pp. –. The Sister Doctrines of the hierarchy of genres and supremacy
of history painting are discussed by Rensselaer W. Lee in Ut pictura poesis: The
Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York, ), pp. –. On Juel, see E. Poulsen,
Jens Juel (Copenhagen, ). An allegorical reading of Friedrich’s Landscape with
Pavilion is offered by Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, Friedrich, cat. no. .
Friedrich’s relation to Sentimentalism is discussed in Herbert von Einem,
‘Die Symbollandschaft der deutschen Romantik’, in Klassizismus und Romantik:
Gemälde und Zeichnungen aus der Sammlung Georg Schäfer (Nuremberg, ),
p. ; my account of the transition from Sentimentalism to Romanticism, as well
as my readings of inscriptions in Freidrich’s early works, owes much to Geoffrey
Hartman, ‘Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry’, in his Beyond
Formalism: Literary Essays – (New Haven, CT, ), pp. –. See
also the essays presented in the anthology From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays
Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. F. W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York,
); William K. Wimsatt, ‘The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery’ (),
anthologized in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Bloom, pp. –; and M. H.
Abrams, ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’ (), antholo-
gized in Romanticism and Consciousness, pp. –.
On the history of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, see Ruth and Max Seydewitz,
Das Dresdener Galerie Buch: Vierhundert Jahre Dresdener Gemäldegalerie (Dres-
den, ). On the conditions of student life in Dresden, see Brunswig,
Enlightenment, pp. –. The phrase ‘Metaphysikus mit dem Pinsel’ was coined
by the Swedish Romantic poet Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, in his Menschen
und Städte: Begegnungen und Beobachtungen eines schwedischen Dichters in Deutsch-
land, Italien und Österreich –, ed. C. M. Schröder (Hamburg, ), p.
, quoted in Sumowski, Friedrich Studien, p. . Friedrich’s fragment alluding
to Hegel is reprinted in Hinz (), p. .
Robert Rosenblum’s interpretation of Friedrich appears as Modern Painting and
the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (London, ), pp. –.

 Friedrich’s System
Schlegel’s statement of c.  about the infinity of genres appears as Fragment
 of his posthumously published Literary Notebooks, – (London,
), quoted in Todorov, Theory of the Symbol, p. . For an analysis of the
Kantian and Romantic sublime, see Thomas Weiskel’s classic study, The Roman-
tic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore,
MD, ), pp. –. For a discussion of the notion of chaos in Schlegel’s writ-
ings, see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, pp. –. Schelling’s
statement about art as the identity between subject and object occurs in his
System des transcendentalen Idealismus (), in Sämmtliche Werke, –, p. .
My analysis of Friedrich’s compositional strategy profited from Börsch-Supan,
‘Bildgestaltung’.
Goethe’s essay on the Strasbourg cathedral, entitled ‘Von deutscher Baukunst:
D. M. Ervini a Steinbach’, was first published in Darmstadt in  and subse-

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quently included, along with essays by Johann Herder and Justus Möser, in the
enormously influential collection Von deutscher Art und Kunst (), collected in
Goethe, Berliner Ausgabe, , Kunsttheoretische Schriften und Übersetzungen, ed.
Siegfried Seidel (Berlin, ), pp. –. Teodor Körner’s ekphrasis, ‘Friedrichs
Totenlandschaft’, was first published in Theodor Körners poetischer Nachlass, ,
Vermischte Gedichte und Erzählungen (Leipzig, ), nr. ; it is included, in full, in
Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, Friedrich, p. . Johanna Schopenhauer’s description of
Friedrich’s elision of a midground in his composition appears in ‘Über Gerhard
von Kügelgen und Friedrich in Dresden: Zwei Briefe mitgetheilt von einer
Kunstfreundin’, Journal des Luxus und der Moden (), pp. –, excerpted in
Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, Friedrich, p. .
A history of the genesis of Monk by the Sea is given in Börsch-Supan and
Jähnig, cat. no. . Richard Wollheim’s reading of the Large Enclosure appears
in Painting as an Art (Princeton, NJ, ), pp. –. The threshold experience
described by Gottfried Benn is analysed brilliantly in Hans Blumenberg,
Höhlenausgänge (Frankfurt, ), p. .

 Symbol and Allegory

The literature on the Romantic distinction between symbol and allegory is vast.
The most powerful and succinct account is still Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode,
pp. –. Useful, too, is Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, pp. –; Hazard
Adams, Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic (Tallahassee, FL, ), pp. –;
and Götz Pochat, Der Symbolbegriff in der Ästhetik und Kunstwissenschaft, trans.
Martha Pochat (Cologne, ), pp. –. More specialized studies include
Lorenz Eitner, ‘The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat’, Art Bulletin, 
(), pp. –; Gunnar Berefelt, ‘On “Symbol” and “Allegory”’, Konsthis-
torika Studier tillägnade Sten Karling (Stockholm, ), pp. –; and Jan
Białostocki, ‘Romantische Ikonographie’ (), in Stil und Ikonographie, rev. ed.
(Cologne, ), pp. –. My approach to the way Friedrich’s images mean
owes much to Paul de Man’s revisionist reading of Romantic aesthetics in ‘The
Rhetoric of Temporality’ in Blindness and Insight, nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis, MN,
), pp. –.
Runge’s drawing Ideales–Reales appeared in his Hinterlassene Schriften, her-
ausgegeben von dessen ältesten Bruder, ed. Daniel Runge,  vols (Hamburg,
–), I, p. ; see also Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Runge in seiner Zeit, ed. Werner
Hofmann, exh. cat. (Munich, ), p. . Josef Görres’s original interpretation
of Runge’s Times of the Day appeared as ‘Die Zeiten, vier Blätter nach Zeichnun-
gen von Ph. O. Runge’, in Heidelberger Jahrbücher für Philologie, Historie,
Literature und Kunst, I, , pp. –; see his Ausgewählte Werke (Freiburg,
), I, p. .
August Wilhelm Ahlborn’s Cloister Cemetery with the Watzmann is mentioned
in Hofmann, ‘Caspar David Friedrichs Tetschen Altar’, pp. –. On the ‘shore-
chapel’ in Vitte, see Sumowski, p. ; Gerhard Eimer, Caspar David Friedrich und
die Gotik (Hamburg, ), p. ; and Eimer, Zur Dialektik des Glaubens, pp. 
–. For Görres on landscape, see Georg Bürke, Vom Mythos zur Mystik: Joseph
von Görres Mystische Lehre und die romantische Naturphilosophie (Einsiedeln,
), p. . Luther’s ‘Epistell an Sankt Stephans tag’, from the Kirschenpostille

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of , appears in Werke: Kritische gesammtausgabe,  vols (Weimar, –),

-, pp.  and ; my other quotation from Luther is taken from ‘Scholien
zum . Psalm. Das schöne Confitimini  ()’, (Werke, -, p. ).
Similar passages occur in Werke, , pp. –, and , pp. –.
Runge’s history of the decline of religion appears in Briefe und Schriften, p. ;
his interpretation of his own Mother at the Source, in a letter of  November 
to his brother Daniel (Briefe und Schriften, p. ). Runge’s project of abstract art
is usefully summarized in Rudolf M. Bisanz, German Romanticism and Philipp Otto
Runge: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Art Theory and Iconography (DeKalb, IL,
), pp. - and passim. On Runge’s Rest on the Flight, its meaning and
genesis, see Hubert Schrade, ‘Die romantische Idee von der Landschaft als
höchstem Gegenstande christliche Kunst’, Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher, n.s.
(), pp.  ff; Otto Georg von Simpson, ‘Phillipp Otto Runge and the Mythol-
ogy of Landscape’, Art Bulletin,  (), pp. –; Runge in Seiner Zeit, pp. 
–; and Traeger, Runge, pp. –, –.
Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Berlin, ) is available in a
modern critical edition by Alfred Anger (Stuttgart, ); the episode of the
visit to the hermit-painter appears there on pp. –. I have profited here from
Alice Kuzniar’s account, ‘The Vanishing Canvas: Notes on German Romantic
Aesthetics’, German Studies Review,  (), pp. –. Another important lit-
erary description of a cross in a landscape appears in the opening scene of Joseph
von Eichendorf ’s novel Ahnung und Erwartung (Nuremberg, ; ed. Gerhardt
Hoffmeister (Stuttgart, ), pp. –); see Richard Alewyn, ‘Eine Landschaft
Eichendorffs’, Euphorion,  (), pp. –. On landscapes with crosses gen-
erally, see Karl Woermann, ‘Kirchenlandschaften’, Repertorium für Kunst-
wissenschaft,  (), p.  ff, and Caspar David Friedrich –, ed.
Hofmann, pp. –. Umberto Eco’s account of indexical signs appears in A
Theory of Semiotics (Indianapolis, IN, ), p. . On Friedrich’s affinity to
Tieck, see Franz Reber, Geschichte der neueren deutschen Kunst (Stuttgart, ),
and Goethe, Kunst und Altertum (), quoted in Sumowski, Friedrich-Studien,
p. . Carus’s Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei exists in a modern edition by
Kurt Gerstenberg (Dresden, n.d.); see pp. –. The most sensible account of
the way ‘the forms of Nature speak directly’ in Friedrich is Henri Zerner and
Charles Rosen, ‘Caspar David Friedrich and the Language of Landscape’,
Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York,
), p. .

 The End of Iconography

Friedrich’s letter to Schulz was published in abridgement, edited by Christian
Semler, in Journal des Luxus und der Moden,  (April ), p. ; the complete
text of the letter appears in H. Zeeck, ‘Romantische Kunstanschauung: Ein
unveröffentlicher Brief von Caspar David Friedrich’, Das Kunstblatt,  (),
pp. –, –, and again in Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, Friedrich, p. . Hoch
(‘Der sogennante Tetschen Altar’), pp.  and  n.) locates flaws in Börsch-
Supan and Jähnig’s published version; the original manuscript is kept now in the
Goethemuseum in Frankfurt (Inv. Hs. ).
Schelling’s discussion of symbol and allegory occurs in §  of Philosophie der

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Kunst (Sämmtliche Werke, –, pp. –. Führich’s gouache sheet after
Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains is discussed in the exhibition catalogue of the
Munich Kunsthalle der Hypo-Stiftung, Deutsche Romantiker: Bildthemen der Zeit
von –, ed. Christoph Heilmann (Munich, ), cat. no. .
Donat de Chapeaurouge’s interpretation of Cross in the Mountains (‘Bemerk-
ungen zu Caspar David Friedrichs Tetschener Altar’) has been criticized by Hoch
(‘Der sogennante Tetschner Altar’), both cited above; see Jean Paul, ‘Reden des
Toten Christus von Weltgebäude herab, dass kein Gott sei’, Blumen- Frucht- und
Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs
(), in Werke, ed. Gustav Lohmann (Munich, ), II–, p. .
Runge’s vision of epochal change occurs in a letter of  March  to Daniel
Runge (Briefe und Schriften, p. ). Hegel’s famous statement on the movement
of art from the church appears in Werke, , Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Geschichte, ed. Eduard Gans (Berlin, ), ; as quoted in Benjamin,
‘Kunstwerk’, p. – n..

 : The Halted Traveller

 Entering the Wood
See Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt, ), p. . The link between Early
Snow and the lost Easter Morning is made by Sumowski (Friedrich-Studien,
pp. , cat. no. ), who follows an account by an early owner of both canvases
(W. Wegener, ‘Der Landschaftsmaler Friedrich: Eine biographische Skizze’,
Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd n.s.  [], pp. –, reprinted in Börsch-
Supan and Jähnig, Friedrich, pp. –). On Faust’s Verweile-doch, see Ernst
Bloch’s ‘Goethes Zeichnung Ideallandschaft’, in Verfremdungen II: Geographica
(Frankfurt, ), p. . Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of autoscopy
appears in Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, ), p. ;
Merleau-Ponty relies on Karl Jaspers, ‘Zur Analyse der Trugwahrnehmung’,
Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie (), E. Menninger-
Lerchenthal, Das Truggebilde der eigenen Gestalt (Berlin, ), p. , and J.
Lhermitte, L’Image de notre Corps (Paris, ), p. . The interpretation of the
raven in Friedrich’s Chausseur as singing a deathsong appeared in an anonymous
review in Vossische Zeitung (), excerpted in Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, p. .
On the Rückenfigur and the question of staffage, see M. Koch, Die Rückenfigur
im Bild von der Antike bis Giotto (Recklinghausen, ); W. Wagmuth, ‘Das
Staffageproblem in der deutschen Landschaftsmalerei um ’ (Ph.D disser-
tation, Munich ); Sumowski, Friedrich-Studien, pp. –; Caspar David
Friedrich –, ed. Hofmann, pp. –. Alberti’s recommendation occurs in
On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT, ), p. . On the
relation between Friedrich and Luiken, see Herbert von Einem, ‘Ein Vorläufer
Caspar David Friedrichs?’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, 
(), p. .
For an introduction, in English, to the main currents in German art after
Friedrich, see Vaughan, German Romantic Art, pp. –.

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 Theomimesis
For Rilke’s Duino Elegies, I have used the translation by J. B. Leischman and
Stephen Spender (New York, ). On Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, see
Ludwig Grote, ‘Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer’, Die Kunst und das schöne
Heim,  (–), p.  ff; and Borsch-Supan and Jähnig, Friedrich, cat. no.
. Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime appears in Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton
(Notre Dame, IN, ), pp.  and . Friedrich’s comment on fog appears in
Hinz (), p. . Kant’s definition of the sublime appears in §  and §  of
the Critique of Judgment (pp.  and ). For Carus on the painting as gaze, see
his Lebenserinnerungen, I, pp. –, excerpted in Hinz, p. .
For the motif of the halted traveller in Wordsworth, see especially Geoffrey
Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry: – (New Haven, CT, ), pp. –
and passim; and Roger Shattuck, ‘This Must Be the Place: From Wordsworth to
Proust’, in Romanticism, ed. Thornburn and Hartman, pp. –. In my reading
of ‘A Night-Piece’, I have profited from Kenneth R. Johnston’s excellent ‘The
Idiom of Vision’, New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth: Selected Papers
of the English Institute, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (New York, ), pp. –.
Carus’s description of Friedrich’s working methods occurs in Lebenserinn-
ungen, I, pp.   (Hinz, p. ). On Friedrich’s studio: David d’Anger’s account
of his visit to Friedrich’s studio is cited by Franz Bauer in Caspar David Friedrich:
Ein Maler der Romantik (Stuttgart, ), pp. –; Wilhelm Kügelgen’s descrip-
tion appears in Jugenderinnungen, pp. –, as quoted in Metropolitan Museum
of Art, German Masters of the Nineteenth Century, exh. cat. (New York, ).
The comparison of Friedrich’s nature studies with drawings in medieval model
books is made in Klaus Lankheit’s ‘Die Frühromantik und die Grundlagen der
Gegenstandslosigen Malerei’, Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher,  (), p. ; for
a general account of Friedrich’s mature graphic manner, see Hans H. Hofstätter,
‘Caspar David Friedrich: Das graphische Werk’, in Caspar David Friedrich, ed.
Bernhard, pp. –. Schelling’s statement on the proper relation of an artist
to nature appears in ‘Ueber das Verhältniss der bildenden Künste zu der Natur’,
Sämmtliche Werke, I–, p. . On the Romantic revision of the concept of mime-
sis, see Todorov, Theories, pp. ‒, and on the whole problem of mimesis, see
Hans Blumenberg, ‘Nachahmung der Nature: Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des
schöpferischen Menschen’, in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart, ),
pp. –.
On the biblical fog, see Wilhelm Fraenger, Hieronymous Bosch: Das tausend-
jährige Reich (Amsterdam, ), p. . For Goethe’s interest in clouds, see Kurt
Badt’s marvellous chapter ‘Goethe und Luke Howard’ in Wolkenbilder und
Wolkengedichte der Romantik (Berlin, ), pp. –. Goethe’s comment to
Boisserée is recorded in Mathilde Boisserée, Sulpiz Boisserées Briefwechsel nebst
Aufzeichnungen,  vols (Stuttgart, ), , pp. –. Carus’s Friedrichan vision
from a summit appears in Neun Briefe, p. . My citation from Maimonides is
taken from The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlände, nd rev. ed. (New
York, ), pp. –.

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 Reflection
Fernow’s theory of staffage is usefully discussed in relation to German art at
 in Gerhard Gerkens’s introduction to the Bremen Kunsthalle exhibition
catalogue Staffage. Oder: Die heimlischen Helden der Bilder (Bremen, ).
Carus’s statement on the beholder in the picture occurs in Neun Briefe, p. –.
‘Verscheidene Empfindungen vor einer Seelandschaft von Friedrich, worauf
ein Kapuziner’, by Kleist, Brentano and Arnim, was published in Berliner
Abendblätter,  ( October ), pp. –; the German text is reprinted in
Hinz (), pp. –. Holt’s Triumph of the Art for the Public contains a good
English translation of the whole piece. For the question of the text’s authorship
and genesis, see Helmut Sembdner, Die Berliner Abendblätter Heinrich von
Kleists, ihre Quellen und Redaktion (Berlin, ), see, further, Helmut Börsch-
Supan, ‘Bemerkungen zu Caspar David Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer’, in
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Verein für Kunstwissenschaft,  (), pp. –; and
Bodo Brinkmann, ‘Zu Heinrich von Kleists “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs
Seelandschaft”’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte,  (), pp. –.
The relation between Friedrich’s Rückenfigur and Schelling’s theory of
staffage was first noted by Sumowski, Friedrich-Studien, p. . The relevant pas-
sage is Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in Sämmtliche Werke, –, p. . G. H.
Schubert’s interpretation of the sepia Stages of Life appears in Ansichten von der
Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden, ), p. . An interesting interpre-
tation of the relation between Friedrich’s Munich Summer and the lost Winter
canvases is offered by Peter Rautmann, Caspar David Friedrich: Landschaft als
Sinnbild entfalteter bürgerlicher Wirklichkeitsaneignung (Frankfurt, ), pp.
–. Erika Platte’s Caspar David Friedrich: Die Jahreszeiten (Stuttgart, ) is
a reliable account of the sepia Stages of Life; a political reading of the series is
offered by Peter Rautmann in ‘Der Hamburger Sepiazyklus: Natur und bürger-
liche Emanzipation bei Caspar David Friedrich’, in Bürgerliche Revolution und
Romantik, ed. Hinz (Giessen, ), pp. –. In my citation of Schiller, I
have used Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly’s translation of On the Naive and
Sentimental in Literature (Manchester, ), p. .

 Déjà vu
On the déjà vu, see Ernst Bloch, ‘Bilder des Déjà vu’, Verfremdungen, I (Frank-
furt, ), pp. –. Goethe’s statement on the pastness of landscape appears
in Maximen und Reflexionen, as quoted in Kuzniar, ‘Vanishing Canvas’, p. .
In my essay of , ‘Borrowed Sight: The Halted Traveller in Caspar David
Friedrich and William Wordsworth’, I offer an extended reading of the relation
between the structure of our belatedness in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and
our experience of Friedrich’s Rückenfigur (published in Word and Image, I
[], pp. –). Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s ekphrasis, ‘Zwey Bilder aus
Maler Freidrichs Werkstatt’, appeared in Reise-Erinnerungen (Dresden, ), ,
pp. –, co-authored with Caroline de la Motte Fouqué; it is included in
Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, Friedrich, p. . The Prelude of  is usefully col-
lected in William Wordsworth, The Prelude , , , ed. Jonathan
Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York, ). Jean-Paul

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Sartre’s park scenario appears in Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenome-

nological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, ), p. ; a brief
summary of this passage and its significance for contemporary art historical
theorization of the gaze is offered by Norman Bryson in ‘The Gaze in the
Expanded Field’, Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, ), pp. –.
Merleau-Ponty’s account of vision appears in the posthumously published col-
lection The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston, IL, ), pp. –; Lacan’s account appears in Four Fun-
damental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Alan
Sheridan (Harmondsworth, ), pp. –. My quotation from Hartman is
taken from his ‘Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness’, in Beyond Formalism,
p. .
Carus’s Raphael and Michelangelo recalls a passage from Heidegger’s essay
‘Wozu Dichter?’, in which the philosopher imagines the poet-precursor in a ves-
pertine landscape: ‘Hölderlin is the pre-cursor [Vor-gänger] of poets in a desti-
tute time. This is why no poet of this world can overtake him. The precursor,
however, does not go off into the future; rather, he arrives out of that future, in
such a way that the future is present only in the arrival of his words . . . If the
precursor cannot be overtaken, no more can he perish; for his poetry remains as
a once-present being [als ein Ge-wesenes].’ (‘Wozu Dichter’ in Holzwege, p. ).
Are not Friedrich’s Rückenfigur visual emblems of das Ge-wesene?
Peter Cornelius’s visit to Friedrich is described in Förster, Biographische und
literarische Skizzen, pp. –, excerpted in Hinz (), pp. –. Harro
Harring’s travel account appeared in Rhongar Jarr: Fahrten eines Friesen in
Dänemark, Deutschland, Ungarn, Holland, Frankreich, Griechenland, Italien und
der Schweiz (Munich, ), I: . This episode is described in Peter Märker,
‘Caspar David Friedrich zur Zeit der Restauration: Zum Verhältnis von Natur-
begriff und geschichtlicher Stellung’, in Bürgliche Revolution, ed. Hinz, pp. 
–. For further political readings of Friedrich’s landscapes, see also Marker’s
‘Geschichte als Natur: Untersuchung zur Entwicklungsvorstellung bei Caspar
David Friedrich’ (Ph.D dissertation, Kiel, ); and, more extensively, Peter
Rautmann, Caspar David Friedrich. For a general account of the politics of the
period, see Friedrich Meinecke’s classic The Age of German Liberation 
–, trans. Peter Paret and Helmut Fischer (Berkeley, , ), and Schnabel,
Deutsche Geschichte, , pp. –. On Ulrich von Hutten, see Volker Press’s
Kaiser Karl V, König Ferdinand und die Entstehung der Reichritterschaft
(Wiesbaden, ); and ‘Ulrich von Hutten, Reichsritter und Humanist –
’, Nassauische Annalen,  (), pp. –.

Afterword
The literature on Caspar David Friedrich has grown enormously since the first
edition of this book. The catalogue accompanying the – Friedrich exhibi-
tion in Essen and Hamburg gives a good snapshot – with an updated bibliogra-
phy – of recent German scholarship (Essen, Museum Folkswang, and Hamburg,
Kunsthalle, Caspar David Friedrich–Die Erfindung der Romantik, ed. Hubertus
Gassner (Munich, ). Work on Friedrich’s own thoughts about art will be
aided by a new edition, underway since , of the artist’s literary remains; see

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   

Caspar David Friedrich, Kritische Edition der Schriften des Künstlers und seiner
Zeitzeugen, : ‘Ausserungen bei Betrachtung einer Sammlung von Gemählden
von grösstenteils noch lebenden und unlängst verstorbenen Künstlern’, ed.
Gerhard Eimer and Günther Rath (Frankfurt, ); see also Friedrich, Die
Briefe, ed. Herrmann Zschoche (Hamburg, ). Friedrich’s English-speaking
admirers will also appreciate Carl Gustav Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape
Painting, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, ), with an excellent introduction
by Oskar Bätschmann. The most significant recent book on Friedrich in English
is Werner Hofmann’s Caspar David Friedrich (London, ).
‘Afterwardsness’ (in German Nachträglichkeit) has been studied most exten-
sively in psychoanalysis; see the entry ‘Deferred Action; Deferred’, in Jean
Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (London, ), pp. –; also Jean Laplanche,
‘Note on Afterwardsness’, in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London,
), pp. –; and Jacques Derrida, ‘Différence’, in Margins of Philosophy,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, ) pp. –. For an historical account of time in
German Romanticism, and particularly on the theme of the ‘now’ as delayed or
refused coincidence with being, see Manfred Frank, Das Problem ‘Zeit’ in der
Deutschen Romantik (nd rev. ed., Paderborn, ), especially pp. –.
Since  important solo exhibitions of Friedrich have been mounted in the
National Gallery, London (), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
( and ), Statens Museum for Konst, Copenhagen (), The Prado,
Madrid (), the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (), and in Essen and
Hamburg (–, see above), all with major accompanying catalogues. The
artist played a key role in ambitious thematic exhibitions, for example at the
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and the Hayward Gallery, London in
– (‘The Romantic Spirit in German Art –’), Palazzo Grassi,
Venice, in  (‘Cosmos: da Goya a De Chirico, da Friedrich a Kiefer: l’arte alla
scoperta dell infinito’), and the Grand Palais, Paris, and the Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin in – (‘Mélancolie: Génie et folie en Occident’), the latter two curated
by Jean Claire.
Friedrich’s statement about transparent painting, made to his supporter, the
Russian poet and imperial tutor Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, is cited in
Sumowski, Caspar David Friedrich–Studien, p. , and discussed in Birgit
Verwebe, ‘Transparent Painting and the Romantic Spirit’, in The Romantic Spirit
in German Romantic Art, –, ed. Keith Hartlet, et al., exh. cat., National
Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, and the South Bank Centre, London
(London, ), p. . On Friedrich’s pigments and his use of smalt, see Aviva
Burnstock, ‘The Materials and Technique of the Winter Landscape’, in Caspar
David Friedrich: Winter Landscape, ed. John Leighton, exh. cat., National
Gallery, London (), pp. –. The thematics of light and transparency are
explored in Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers, exh. cat. by Sabine Rewald,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, CT, ).
On the topologies of Friedrich’s art, see Karl-Ludwig Hoch, Caspar David
Friedrich und die böhmische Bergen (Dresden, ); Hoch, Caspar David Friedrich
in der Sächsische Schweiz (Dresden, ); Herrmann Zschoche, Caspar David
Friedrich auf Rügen (Amsterdam, ); and Zschoche, Caspar David Friedrich im
Harz (Amsterdam, ). Developing the work of Mayumi Ohara (‘Demut, Indi-

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   

vidualität, Gefühl. Betrachtungen über C. D. Friedrichs kunsttheoretische

Schriften und ihre Entstehungsumstände’, Ph.D diss., Berlin, ), Werner
Busch has insisted – vigorously and systematically – on the empirical tenor of
Friedrich’s art (Caspar David Friedrich. Ästhetik und Religion, Munich, ).
On the problem of copies in Friedrich’s oeuvre, see especially John Leighton,
‘The Winter Landscape’, in Caspar David Friedrich: Winter Landscape, exh. cat.,
pp. –.
The site represented in Friedrich’s watercolour in Hamburg, and in the Dres-
den canvas and Winterstein sepia made after it, was identified by Petra Kuhlmann-
Hodick; see Cambridge, Harvard University Art Museums, Fuseli to Menzel:
Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe from a German Private Collection,
exh. cat. by Hinrich Sieveking (Munich, ), p. . On the subterranean in
Friedrich, see Catherine Clinger, ‘Caspar David Friedrich and the Catachthonic
Cultures of Romantic Science and Technology’ (Ph.D, London, ).
My work on Friedrich’s inheritance sent me to the beginnings of the
Renaissance in Germany. Focused on Albrecht Dürer and his subversive disci-
ple Hans Baldung Grien, The Moment of Self-portraiture in German Renaissance
Art (Chicago, ) explored the historical origins of the artwork as the image
and index of its creator. Protestant art, which repudiated such a heroizing con-
ception of art, was treated there through a chapter on Lucas Cranach the Elder’s
Lutheran allegories of the Law and the Gospel. Subsequently, in The Reforma-
tion of the Image (London and Chicago, ), I studied the effect Luther had on
German art through an analysis of the altarpiece Cranach made for
Lutheranism’s mother church in Wittenberg. Although the earliest of the three,
this present book forms the third and final part of a trilogy; the line connecting
Cranach to Luther is summarized in The Reformation of the Image, pp. – and
–. See also my essay ‘Kunstreform und Kunstbewahrung in Deutschland seit
’, in Nationalschätze aus Deutschland: Von Luther zum Bauhaus, exh. cat., ed.
Roland Enke, Konferenz Nationaler Kultureinrichtung and Kunst- und Austellungs-
halle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (Munich, ), pp. –.

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All measurements given in centimetres.

 Trees and Bushes in the Snow, , oil on canvas,  × ..

Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.
 Fir Trees in the Snow, , oil on canvas,  × . Ernst von
Siemens-Kunstfonds, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Munich.
 Study of Fir Trees,  April , graphite, . × . From the
Sketchbook of , sheet , National Gallery, Oslo.
 Swans in the Rushes, c. –, oil on canvas, . × . Freies Deutsches
Hochstift, Frankfurt.
 Winter Landscape, , oil on canvas,  × . Staatliche Museen,
Schwerin.
 Landscape with Oaks and Hunter, , oil on canvas,  × .. Stiftung
Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur.
 Winter Landscape with Church, , oil on canvas,  × . National
Gallery, London.
 Altar (Design for the Mariankirche in Stralsund), –, pen and ink
with wash,  × .. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.
 Landscape with Pavilion, , pen and ink and watercolour, . × .
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Mountain Landscape, , sepia, . × .. Goethe Nationalmuseum,
Weimar.
 Cromlech in the Snow, , oil on canvas, . × . Gemäldegalerie,
Dresden.
 View of the Elbe Valley, , oil on canvas, . × . Gemäldegalerie,
Dresden.
 Tetschen Altarpiece or Cross in the Mountains, –, oil on canvas,
 ×  (without frame). Gemäldegalerie, Dresden,
 Hut in the Snow, c. , oil on canvas,  × . National Gallery, Berlin.
 Epitaph for Johann Emanuel Bremer, c. , oil on canvas, . × .
Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin.
 Two Men Contemplating the Moon, c. , oil on canvas,  × .
National Gallery, Berlin.
 Large Enclosure, c. , oil on canvas, . × .. Gemäldegalerie,
Dresden.
 Morning (Departure of the Boats), c. –, oil on canvas,  × ..
Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover.
 Woman at the Sea, c. , oil on canvas,  × .. Stiftung Oskar Reinhart,
Winterthur.

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   

 Fog, c. , oil on canvas, . × . Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

 Morning in the Riesengebirge, , oil on canvas,  × . Schloss
Charlottenburg, Berlin.
 The Churchyard, -, oil on canvas,  × .. Kunsthalle, Bremen.
 Bohemian Landscape with Two Trees, c. , oil on canvas,  × ,
Wurttembergische Staatgaleric, Stuttgart.
 Hill and Ploughed Field near Dresden, c. , oil on canvas, . × ..
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 View from the Artists Atelier, Left Window, –, sepia over graphite,
 × . Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
 Cross in the Mountains (design for the Tetschen Altarpiece), c. ,
watercolour over pen and ink, . × .. Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden.
 Raphael, Sistine Madonna, –, oil on canvas,  × .
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.
 Philipp Otto Runge, Morning (small version), , oil on canvas,
 × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Cross on the Baltic, , oil on canvas,  × . Schloss Charlottenburg,
Berlin.
 Self-portrait, c. , black chalk,  × .. Statens Museum for Konst,
Copenhagen.
 Self-portrait with Cap and Visor,  May , sepia wash over graphite,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Self-portrait, c. , black chalk,  × .. National Gallery, Berlin.
 Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, c. ,
oil on canvas,  × . National Gallery, Berlin.
 Mother Heide, c. , black chalk. Stiftung Pommern, Kiel.
 Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, c. , black chalk. Stiftung Oskar Reinhart,
Winterthur.
 Market-place at Greifswald, c. , watercolour over pen and ink,
. × . City Museum, Griefswald.
 Male Nude seen from Behind, –, graphite,  × .. City Museum,
Griefswald.
 Rügen Landscape: The Jasmund Meadow, near Monchgut by Vilmnitz,  June
, pen and graphite, . × .. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.
 View of Arkona with Rising Moon, –, sepia over graphite, . × .
Albertina, Vienna.
 Nude Youth, , chalk and graphite,  × .. Library of the Art
Academy, Copenhagen.
 Scene from Schiller’s ‘Die Rauber’ (Act V, scene I),  June , pen and
ink with watercolour, . × .. National Gallery, Berlin.
 Scene from Schiller’s ‘Die Rauber’ (Act V, scene ),  June , pen and
ink with watercolour, . × .. National Gallery, Berlin.
 Jens Juel, Northern Light, oil on canvas. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen.
 Emilias Kilde, Monument in Park near Copenhagen,  May ,
watercolour over pen and ink, . X .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Seated Woman on a Rock,  August , pen and ink, . × .
Kunsthalle, Mannheim.

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 Woman with a Spider’s Web between Bare Trees, c. , woodcut by

Christian Friedrich. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Scene of Mourning on the Shore,  May , watercolour over pen and
ink and sepia, . × .. Kunsthalle, Mannheim.
 Scene of leave-taking,  May , pen and ink with watercolour,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Mannheim.
 Dolmen by the Sea, –, sepia over graphite, . × . Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen, Weimar.
 High Mountains, c. –, oil on canvas,  × . Destroyed ,
formerly in National Gallery, Berlin.
 Philipp Otto Runge, Amaryllis formosissima, , oil on canvas over
cardboard, . × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Jacob Ruisdael, Jewish Cemetery, –, oil on canvas,  × . Detroit
Institute of Arts.
 Bohemian Landscape with Milleschauer, c. , oil on canvas,  × .
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.
 Landscape with Ruined Wall, c. –, watercolour, ink and graphite,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Landscape with Rainbow, c. , oil on canvas,  × .. Untraced,
formerly Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Weimar.
 Claude Lorrain, Coastal Scene with Acis and Galatea, , oil on canvas,
 × . Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.
 Augustus Bridge in Dresden, c. , oil on canvas,  × .. Destroyed
in  in the fire at the Munich Glass Palace, formerly Kunsthalle,
Hamburg.
 Garden Terrace, –, oil on canvas, . × . Potsdam. Staatliche
Schlösser und Gärten, Potsdam.
 Cemetery Entrance, c. –, oil on canvas (unfinished),  × .
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.
 J.M.W. Turner, The Angel Standing in the Sun, , oil on canvas,
. × .. Tate, London.
 Philipp Otto Runge, The Contrast Ideal – Real, –, pen and ink.
 Vision of the Christian Church, c. , oil on canvas, . × ..
Collection Georg Schäfer, Obbach near Schweinfurt.
 The Cathedral, c. , oil on canvas, . × .. Collection Georg
Schäfer, Obbach near Schweinfurt.
 August Wilhelm Ahlborn, Cloister Cemetery near the Watzmann, ,
oil on canvas, . × .. Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin.
 Ground-plan of an Oval Space, ?–, pen and ink,  × . Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.
 Cloister Cemetery in the Snow, –, oil on canvas,  × . Destroyed
, formerly in the National Gallery, Berlin.
 Pilgrimage at Sunrise, c. , sepia over graphite, . × . Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen, Weimar.
 Philipp Otto Runge, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, –, oil on canvas
(unfinished), . × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Philipp Otto Runge, Nile Valley Landscape, –, grey ink and brush
over graphite, . × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

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 Adrian Zingg, Prebischkegel in Saxon Switzerland, c. , sepia, . × ..

Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
 Joseph von Führich, Cross in the Mountains, , gouache, . × ..
Private collection, Munich.
 Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Law and the Gospels, c. , woodcut.
 Early Snow, c. , oil on canvas,  × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Chausseur in the Forest, –, oil on canvas, . × .. Private
collection, Bielefeld.
 Neubrandenburg, c. , oil on canvas,  × , Stiftung Pommern, Kiel.
 Woman at the Window, , oil on canvas,  × . National Gallery,
Berlin.
 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. , oil on canvas, . × ..
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Morning Fog in the Mountains, c. , oil on canvas,  × . Staatliche
Museen Schloss Heidecksburg, Rudolstadt.
 Clouds over the Riesengebirge, c. –, oil on canvas, . × ..
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Mountain Landscape, , oil on canvas (unfinished), . × ..
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.
 Easter Morning, , oil on canvas, . × .. Museo Thyssen
Bornemisza, Madrid.
 Jan van Eyck, Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, c. , oil on panel,  × .
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
 Allaert van Everdingen, The Draughtsman, , etching.
 Jan Luiken, Iris, etching. Illustration from Christopher Weigelio, Ethica
Naturalis (Nuremberg, ).
 Pierced Rock in Uttewald Valley, c. , sepia (unfinished), . × ..
Museum Folkwang, Essen.
 Summer, , oil on canvas, . × .. Bayerische Staats-
gemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
 Monk by the Sea, –, oil on canvas,  × .. National Gallery,
Berlin.
 Abbey in the Oak Forest, –, oil on canvas, . × .. National
Gallery, Berlin.
 Mountain Landscape with Rainbow, c. , oil on canvas,  × .
Museum Folkwang, Essen.
 Mountain Pasture with the Source of the River Elbe, c. –, watercolour
and graphite,  × . Private collection, Munich.
 Landscape in Riesengebirge, c. –, watercolour and graphite,
. × .. Stiftung Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur.
 Riesengebirge Landscape, c. , oil on canvas (unfinished), . × .
National Gallery, Oslo.
 Memories of the Riesengebirge, c. , oil on canvas, . × .. State
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
 Oak Tree in the Snow, c. , oil on canvas,  × . National Gallery,
Berlin.
 Flatlands on the Bay of Griefswald, c. , oil on canvas, . × ..
Sammlung Georg Schäfer, Obbach near Schweinfurt.


   

 Seashore in the Moonlight, c. , oil on canvas,  × , National Gallery,

Berlin.
 Woman Before the Setting Sun, c. , oil on canvas,  × . Museum
Folkwang, Essen.
 Riesengebirge Landscape with Rising Fog, c. –, oil on canvas,
. × .. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek,
Munich.
 Sunrise near Neubrandenburg, c. , oil on canvas (unfinished),
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Self-portrait with Supporting Arm, c. , pen and ink over graphite,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Rocky Summit,  June , graphite, . × .. Kupferstichkabinett,
Dresden.
 Landscape Studies,  June , graphite,  × .. Fogg Art Museum,
Cambridge, MA; Coll. Sachs, Daly, & Friends of Harvard Art Museums
Funds.
 Plant Study, , pen and ink with grey wash. National Gallery, Berlin.
 Study of Groups of Trees,  and  June , pencil. National Gallery,
Oslo.
 Johann Christian Clausen Dahl, Cloud Study with Horizon, , oil on
paper, . × .. National Gallery, Berlin.
 Evening Star, c. –, oil on canvas, . x . Freies Deutsches
Hochstift, Goethemuseum, Frankfurt.
 Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, –, oil on canvas, . ×  . Stiftung Oskar
Reinhart, Winterthur.
 Evening, September , oil on cardboard,  × .. Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna.
 Evening, October , oil on cardboard,  × .. Kunsthalle, Mannheim.
 Cromlech in Autumn, c. , oil on canvas,  × . Gemäldegalerie,
Dresden.
 Solitary Tree, c. , oil on canvas,  × . National Gallery, Berlin.
 The Watzmann, –, oil on canvas,  × . National Gallery, Berlin.
 The Sea of Ice, c. –, oil on canvas, . × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Morning, c. , oil on canvas,  × .. Niedersächsisches
Landesmuseum, Hanover.
 Noon, c. , oil on canvas,  × . Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum,
Hanover.
 Afternoon, c. , oil on canvas,  × . Niedersächsisches
Landesmuseum, Hanover.
 Evening, c. , oil on canvas, . × . Niedersächsisches Landes-
museum, Hanover.
 The Stages of Life, c. , oil on canvas, . × . Museum der
bildenden Künste, Leipzig.
 Moonrise at Sea, c. , oil on canvas,  × . National Gallery, Berlin.
 Landscape with Windmills, c. –, oil on canvas, . × .. Schloss
Charlottenburg, Berlin.
 Ship on the Elbe in Mist, c. , oil on canvas, . × .. Wallraf-Richartz
Museum, Cologne.


   

 Churchyard in the Snow, c. , oil on canvas,  × . Museum der
bildenden Künste, Leipzig.
 View of a Harbour, c. , oil on canvas. Staatliche Schlösser und
Garten, Potsdam.
 On the Sailing-boat, –, oil on canvas. State Hermitage Museum,
St Petersburg.
 Moonrise over the Sea, , oil on canvas,  × . State Hermitage
Museum, St Petersburg.
 Winter, –, oil on canvas,  × . Destroyed  in the fire at the
Munich Glass Palace.
 Sea with Sunrise, from the Stages of Life series, c. , sepia over graphite,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Skeletons in Cave, from the Stages of Life series, c. , sepia over graphite,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Spring, from the Stages of Life series, c. , sepia over graphite,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Summer, from the Stages of Life series, c. , sepia over graphite.
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Autumn, from the Stages of Life series, c. , sepia over graphite,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Winter, from the Stages of Life series, c. , sepia over graphite,
. × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Angels in Adoration, from the Stages of Life series, c. , sepia over
grtphite, . × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
 Two Men Contemplating the Moon, , oil on canvas,  × .
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.
 Ulrich von Hutten’s Grave, c. –, oil on canvas,  × . Staatliche
Kunstsammlung, Weimar.
 Graves of Ancient Heroes, , oil on canvas, . × .. Kunsthalle,
Hamburg.
 Eldena Ruin, c. , oil on canvas,  × . National Gallery, Berlin.
 Meadow near Griefswald, c. –, oil on canvas,  × .. Kunsthalle,
Hamburg.
 Rocky Gorge, c. , oil on canvas,  × . Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna.
 Carl Gustav Carus, Raphael and Michelangelo, , oil on canvas,
. × . Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Goethemuseum, Frankfurt.
 Entrance to a Chamber in the Convent Church of the Holy Cross near
Meissen, c. , watercolour over pencil on wove paper,  × ..
Kupferstichkabinett, Kunsthalle Hamburg.
 Entrance to a Chamber in the Convent Church of the Holy Cross near Meissen,
c. , oil on canvas,  × . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
 Rock Cave,  June , pencil on wove paper, . × ..
Pommersches Landesmuseum, Greifswald.
 Quarry near Krippen,  July , watercolour over pencil on wove paper,
 × .. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.
 Oybin Ruins in the Moonlight, s, watercolour and bodycolour on
transparent paper,  × . Stiftung Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle.


   

 Design for Choir of Marienkirche, Stralsund, , pencil, ink and water-
colour on paper, . × .. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.
 Woman Seated on a Rock and Study of a Scythe,  August and 
September , brown wash over pencil, and pen in black over pencil
traces on wove paper (from ‘Small Mannheim Sketchbook’), . × ..
Kunsthalle, Mannheim.
 Entrance to a Chamber in the Convent Church of the Holy Cross near
Meissen, c. –, brush in sepia over pencil on wove paper, . × ..
Sammlung Winterstein, Munich.
 Letter to Louise Seidler,  May , ink on paper, . × ..
Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden.
 Ruins of the Choir of Oybin Monastery,  July , watercolour over
pencil,  × .. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


 

Aberli, Johann Ludvig  Chapeaurouge, Donat de 

Abildgaard, Nicolai Abraham , Clare, John 
, ,  Claude see Lorrain
Ahlborn, August Wilhelm ,  Clinger, Catherine 
Alberti, Leon Battista ,  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor ,
Allgemeine Zeitung  –, , ‒
Arndt, Ernst Moritz ,  Copenhagen , , , , ,
Arnim, Ludwig Achim von , , , 
, ,  Cornelius, Peter , 
Aubert, Andreas  Cotta, Johann 
Cranach, Lucas , , 
Benn, Gottfried  Creuzer, Friedrich , 
Bergler, Joseph 
Berlin , , , , ,  Dahl, Johann Christian Clausen ,
Bismarck, Otto von  , 
Blake, William  David d’Angers , 
Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung David, Jacques-Louis 
 de Man, Paul 
Blumenberg, Hans  Dortmund , 
Boisserée, Sulpiz  Dresden , , , , , , , ,
Börsch-Supan, Helmut –, , , –, , , , , 
 Dürer, Albrecht , –, , ,
Bowles, William Lisle  
Brentano, Clemens , , , Dyck, Anthony van 
, 
Brincken, Colonel Friedrich von Eco, Umberto 
– Elsheimer, Adam 
Brühl-Schaffgotsche, Countess  Everdingen, Allaert van 
Brunswig, Henri ,  Eyck, Jan van –
Buonarotti see Michelangelo
Burke, Edmund  Fernow, Carl Ludwig 
Burnstock, Aviva  Förster, Karl , 
Friedrich, Adolf Gottlieb 
Cambridge  Agnes 
Carus, Carl Gustav , –, –, Caroline (née Bommer) , 
, , –, , –, Emma 
–, – Gustav , 
Nine Letters on Landscape Painting Johann Christoffer 
, – Sophie Dorothea (née Breckly) 


 

Freud, Sigmund  Kant, Immanuel , , , 

Fuhrich, Joseph von  Critique of Judgement , 
Keifer, Anselm 
Gadamer, Hans-Georg , , , Kersting, Georg Friedrich , ,
 , , 
German Democratic Republic Kleist, Heinrich von , , –,
(GDR)  , 
Giotto  Koch, Joseph Anton , , 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von , Körner, Theodor –
, , , , , –, Kosegarten, Gotthard Ludwig –,
, , , , 
‘Schäfers Klagelied’  Kotzebue, August 
Görres, Joseph von , , , Kügelgen, Gerhard von , , ,
 , –, 
Gossaert, Jan  Kügelgen, von Marie Helene 
Göttingen  Wilhelm , 
Greifswald , , , , –, , Kühn, Gottlieb Christian 
, , , , 
Gursky, Andreas  Lacan, Jacques 
Gustav IV Adolf, King of Sweden Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 
, , ,  Lebrun, Charles 
Christian (brother)  Leipzig 
Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim 
Hackert, Jakob Philipp , , Lieber, Karl Wilhelm 
 Lilienstern, Johann Jacob O. A.
Hamburg ,  Ruhle von –, , , 
Harring, Harro  Travels with the Army in the Year
Hartman, Friedrich   
Hartman, Geoffrey , , , Litoměřice State Archives 
,  Lorentzen, Christian August 
Hartmann, Ferdinand  Lorrain, Claude , , , ,
Hegel, G.W.F. , , , , , 
 Luiken, Jan 
Heidegger, Martin  Lund, Johan Ludwig Gebhard ,
Heinrich, August  
Hoch, Karl-Ludwig ‒ Luther, Martin , , , ,
Holbein, Hans  , 
Hölderlin, Friedrich ,  Lübeck , , 
Howard, Luke  Lyons 
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 
Hutten, Ulrich von – Maimonides, Moses 
van Mander, Karel 
Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice , 
Jaspers, Karl  Metternich, Prince Klemens von 
Jerusalem ,  Michelangelo , , , , 
Journal des Luxus und der Moden Mohammed 
– Moritz, Karl-Philipp 
Juel, Jens –,  de la Motte-Fouqué, Friedrich 


 

Möser, Justus  Richter, Gerhard 

History of Osnabrück  Richter, Ludwig , 
Munich ,  Rilke, Rainer Maria , 
Müller, Adam  Robbe-Grillet, Alain 
Dans le labyrinthe 
Nancy, Jean-Luc  Rosenblum, Robert 
Napoleon, Emperor , , , , Modern Painting and the Northern
, , ,  Tradition 
Neer, Aert van der  Ruisdael, Jacob , –, 
Neubrandenburg , ,  Runge, Daniel 
Nietzsche, Friedrich  Runge, Philipp Otto –, , ,
Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen  , , , –, , –,
Novalis , –, , , , , , , , –, –, , ,
, , , ,  
Hymns of the Night ,  Rügen , , , , , ,
Logological Fragments  

Ofterdingen, Heinrich von  Sand, Karl Ludwig 

Oslo , , ,  Sartre, Jean Paul 
Ossian ,  Schelling, F.W.J. , , , ,
Ostade, Adriaen van  , , , –
Schiller, Friedrich , , , 
Palma Vecchio, Giacomo  Die Räuber , 
Paris ,  Schimmelmann, Countess Emilia
Paul, Jean – (née Countess von Rantzau) –
Pauelsen, Erik  Count Ernst 
Phoebus  Schlegel, August Wilhelm , 
Plato  Friedrich –, , , , ,
Poussin, Nicolas ,  –, –, , 
Prague  Athenäum , , , , ,
Preissler, Daniel  
Praxis Invented through Theory  Schleiermacher, Friedrich –,
, , 
Quistorp, Johann Gottfried , –, Monologues 
 Schopenhauer, Johanna 
Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich von
Ramdohr, Friedrich W. Basil von , , , –, 
, –, –, , , , , , Schultze, Johannes Karl Hartwig
, , –, , , –, , 
–, –, , , , Schwerin , 
–, , , ,  Scott, Sir Walter 
Reber, Franz – Semler, Christian August , –
History of Modern German Shakespeare, William 
Painting – Solger, K.W.F. 
Reimer, Georg A.  Steffens, Heinrich 
Reinhart, Johann Christian  Stralsund , 
Rembrandt  Strasbourg 
Reni, Guido  Stuttgart , 


 

Teniers, David 
Tetschen Castle , , , , 
Theocritus 
Thorild, Thomas 
Thun-Hohenstein, Count Franz
Anton von , , –
Countess Maria Theresa von (née
Buhl) , 
Tieck, Ludwig , , , , ,
, , –, , , ,
, 
Tübingen 
Turner, J.M.W. 

Vienna , , , 

Vitte , 

Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich

–, –, 
Herzensergiessungen eines kun-
stliebenden Klosterbrüders 
Weigelio, Christophoro 
Westphalia, Peace of 
Wilhelm III of Prussia, King ,

Winckelmann, J. J. 
Wolgast 
Wollheim, Richard 
Wordsworth, William , –,
, –, , –, ‒

Young, Edward 

Zeitung für die elegante Welt , ,


Zingg, Adrian , 
Zinzendorf, Count Nicolas Ludwig
von 
Zschoche, Herrmann ‒

